Day: September 9, 2025

Suspicious Minds: Medical Experts Cast Doubt On Lesin Autopsy rferl.org/a/of-suspicious-mi…
The autopsy report obtained by RFE/RL following more than two years of litigation over Freedom Of Information Act requests is incomplete; some pages are heavily redacted; signatures are whited out. But the details of laboratory results, observations by pathologists from the chief medical examiner’s office and Georgetown University hospital, and an unidentified forensic anthropologist are included in relatively precise detail.
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“I’ve done 12,000 autopsies over my career,” said Donald Jason, a forensic pathology consultant and retired professor from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina. “A good number have been alcoholics. And I’ve never seen a fractured hyoid bone on someone who’s falling around drunk.”
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“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” said Tom Andrews, who retired in 2017 as chief medical examiner for the state of New Hampshire, and reviewed the file at RFE/RL’s request.

“This is an unusual case, the complexity of the injuries, even for an alcoholic,” he said. “It’s an unusual constellation of injuries to see in an accidental death, in a fall or a series of falls, from a standing height.”

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not answer an e-mail seeking further comment by the time of publication of this article.
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Documenting the conversation in a supplemental report dated April 1, 2016, and included in the file handed over to RFE/RL, the official notes that the fracture occurred “at or near the time” of death. While other causes could not be ruled out — including a “significant fall” or that the bone was broken during the autopsy — such an injury was “commonly associated with hanging or manual strangulation,” the official wrote.
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Police records, however, state that there was a “problem” with the disk that was storing the video footage from the 9th-floor penthouse where Lesin was staying. An unidentified agent states that he was unable to review footage of the 9th-floor hallway from 1:02 p.m. until 11:14 p.m. due to the problem with the disk — a period that includes nearly three hours after Lesin was last known to have been seen alive.

It’s unclear whether that specific footage was ever reviewed.

Asked for further comment on the question of the footage, the Metropolitan Police Department referred questions to the U.S. Justice Department, which oversees both the FBI as well as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. The Justice Department, meanwhile, referred queries from RFE/RL to the Metropolitan Police Department.
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Karl Williams, chief medical examiner of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, echoed other observations that the absence of further information from the police investigative records makes it harder to get a full picture.

“The key to this case lies in what’s not in the medical examiner’s file,” he said. “There’s more missing in the medical examiner’s file than what’s there.”

As for the hyoid, he said, “It would be extraordinarily rare to see this fractured from a fall.”
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— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) Sep 9, 2025