Celebrity coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht -- who's consulted on the deaths of everyone from
JFK to Elvis Presley to Anna Nicole Smith -- told a Manhattan jury yesterday that
getting stabbed in the heart is only "moderately" painful, at worst.
"Yes, there is pain, but it's not great pain, such as a kidney stone, or a gall stone
in the bile duct, or a break in a big bone," Wecht testified in the sensational
"Harlem Kevorkian" murder trial, which goes to a jury today. "It's really just minimal
to moderate pain."
Wecht, 79, was the only defense witness called on behalf of Kenneth Minor, an East
Harlem man "hired" off the street by Long Island self-help motivational speaker
Jeffrey Locker to kill him in a fake mugging so his family could collect $18 million
in insurance.
KEVORKIAN DEFENSE: Kenneth Minor, in court yesterday, is accused of killing a
motivational speaker he says hired him to stab him in the heart.
Steven Hirsch
KEVORKIAN DEFENSE: Kenneth Minor, in court yesterday, is accused of killing a
motivational speaker he says hired him to stab him in the heart.
Both sides agree that the debt-plagued Locker, 52, hired Minor to "Do a Kevorkian" by
helping stage the fatal mugging in Locker's Dodge sedan in the predawn hours of July,
16, 2009.
Prosecutors call Minor a contract killer who plunged a knife seven times into Locker's
chest.
But Minor insists through his lawyer, Daniel Gotlin, that he only held the knife
against Locker's steering wheel as Locker repeatedly impaled himself.
Minor hopes to be acquitted of murder under an assisted-suicide defense.
Toward that end, Wecht testified that it's entirely possible for very despondent
people to repeatedly stab themselves, even in the heart, because it doesn't take much
strength and only causes "minimal to moderate" pain.
At least one of history's very few survivors of such an injury would disagree.
"I was just in extreme, excruciating pain," Christopher McCarthy, who was stabbed in
the heart in January 2009 by a crazed man on the subway, testified.
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