When actor and comedian Bob Saget was found dead in an Orlando, Florida hotel room on Jan. 9, authorities quickly declared the death to be accidental as there was no evidence of alcohol or drug use or any signs of foul play.
Now that an autopsy has been released, the possibility of foul play may have to be reconsidered as some doctors suggest the “head trauma” Saget suffered appeared to be greater than what could be expected from a minor slip and fall, TheBlaze reported.
Bob Saget’s autopsy released
The family of Bob Saget had issued a statement earlier in the week when the preliminary results of the autopsy had been released by the Orange County Medical Examiner’s office in Florida.
“They have concluded that he accidentally hit the back of his head on something, thought nothing of it, and went to sleep,” the family said of the findings, according to ABC News. “No drugs or alcohol were involved.”
Indeed, chief medical examiner Dr. Joshua Stephany reiterated in the preliminary autopsy that there was “no evidence of drug use or foul play” and that the death had been accidental, “the result of blunt head trauma,” and had been “most likely incurred from an unwitnessed fall.”
Multiple fractures to different parts of the skull
Upon public release of the full autopsy, though, NewsNation reported on the rather extensive list of Saget’s injuries that had been documented by the medical examiner’s office.
In medical terms, according to the outlet, those injuries included “an abrasion on the back of his scalp, subgaleal hemorrhaging under the back of his scalp, a linear fracture to the base of his skull, comminuted fractures (bone broken into more than two pieces) on ‘the roofs of the orbits involving the bilateral and frontal bone,’ and a subdural hematoma and additional hemorrhaging.”
Yet, while those injuries are consistent with the determination of blunt head trauma as the cause of death, some doctors suspect that those injuries indicated something much more severe than a relatively minor “slip and fall” in a hotel room.
Some doctors suspect there is more to the story
“This is significant trauma,” Dr. Gavin Britz, director of the Houston Methodist Neurological Institute, told The New York Times. “This is something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”
An emergency room doctor from Rhode Island, Dr. Megan Ranney, posted a screenshot of the autopsy report to Twitter and wrote, “This is not a ‘slip & fall’. This is not a minor concussion. This is MAJOR head trauma. My condolences to Saget’s friends & family. I hope that they get answers as to what really happened.”
She did, however, add in a follow-up tweet, “PS: this doesn’t mean it was INTENTIONAL trauma, either. But this is more than just ‘I whacked my head on the kitchen cabinet.'”
Likewise, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta explained that Saget’s injuries were more than “a simple bump on the head” but rather were more indicative of a “very significant blow” or perhaps even multiple impacts to the skull suffered in something like a fall down a flight of stairs or being in a car accident.
