ABSTRACT

The morbidity and mortality rates are very high in the cases of electrical injury, and the manner of death is exclusively accidental. The tissue damage is due to the thermal or direct effect of electrocution. The main determinants of current flow are the amount of current, resistance of human body, pathway of the current and the contact period. Two cases who died of the high voltage electrical injury are reported in this paper.

CASE I: A 36 year old male was electrocuted by high voltage electric current (30.000 Volt) without contact while he was maintaining the electrical transformer and found dead at the site of incident.

CASE II: A 26 year old male, contacted high voltage electric lines (24.000 Volt) while he was loading goods on to the train and died on the sixth day of the treatment.

We found burns on the clothes and body of the first case at the external examination. There were also burned areas covering nearly the whole body in the 2nd case. Histopathological specimens of the autopsies showed non-specific findings from the current pathway in both cases.

In addition to the crime scene investigation the clothes of victims must be examined carefully in the cases of electrocution death, and the specimens including adjacent tissues from all defined and suspicious looking skin lesions must be taken for histopathology, labelled in different containers and sent to laboratory.