It seems like hardly a week goes by these days that we do not here of someone being killed by blunt force trauma. A young woman hiker in Georgia disappears on a hike through a state park near Atlanta. Her body is eventually found and the medical examiner determines that her death was due to blunt force trauma to the head; the body was also decapitated. Just this month a twenty year old pregnant female marine Lance Corporal stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina is found dead the victim of blunt force trauma to the head by a weapon probably a crow bar or tire iron.

What is blunt force trauma?
Blunt force trauma is kind of an umbrella term. It is non-specific but sufficient enough to put on a death certificate. However, it can take many forms. Blunt force trauma is caused by a blunt object striking some part of the body. The blunt object may be a bat, wrench, hammer, floor, dashboard, etc. The typical signs of blunt force trauma include lacerated major blood vessels or aorta, lacerated or crushed organs, hematoma, crushed or severed spinal cord or fractures of the skull. Any one of these injuries is sufficient to cause death.

While automobile accidents and accidental falls represent the greatest causes of blunt force trauma, this type of injury is also present in a wide variety of homicide cases when gunshot wound is not the cause of death. Most homicides involving blunt force trauma result from the victim being struck in the head or neck with an object such as a hammer, fireplace poker, flower vase, etc. In these cases the bones of the skull or neck are fractured in one or more places by the velocity of the blow. Blunt force trauma can also occur if the victim has been severely beaten with an object or with fists. In these cases the injuries are generally to internal organs like the kidneys, liver, spleen, etc.

Blunt Force Trauma to the Brain
The brain can be damaged by trauma in two ways. When the head is struck by a hard object the cerebral cortex (gray matter) can become bruised. If the force of the blow is sufficient to cause a whiplash like circumstance then the injury can occur to the nerve cells (axonal injury) deep in the white matter of the brain. Injury of this type involves a variety of forces including the acceleration of the object and the acceleration force imparted to the brain by the object. Injury results from the direct contact between the object and the head and the greatest injury to the head occurs from the initial direct impact with the blunt object. The area of contact may be large (a baseball bat, 2x4) or small (hammer head, a paper weight) but the velocity of the impact will largely determine the extent and type of damage caused by the resulting blow.