The New Yorker

Years and years ago I used to read The New Yorker and enjoy the cartoons and the little quips they made at the bottom of columns after some rather funny, or non-sensical news stories. I don't know if they still do that, because all the waiting rooms I've been in recently pulled their magazine selections due to Covid to guard against spreading the disease even further through contact with finger-licked magazine pages. This might have been a good thing. But anyway...

Dr. Vincent DiMaio, 81, a pathologist sought out in famed murder cases has passed away.

I knew the name sounded familiar, and I was right. His father, Dominick, was a New York City Chief Medical Examiner whose name I would see on a sign on a brick building on the east side of First Avenue that was part of NYU Hospital. That name and Dr. Milton Halpern were the city's medical examiners I knew of as I passed the building. They were legends.

And so apparently was Vincent DiMaio. He came from an incredible ancestral line of physicians. The NYT obit by Sam Roberts tells us Dr. DiMaio in a memoir mentioned that "since the 1600s, all the men on my mother's side, with one exception, were doctors." The exception became a magistrate. Dr. Vincent's three sisters all became physicians.

Dr. DiMaio was a much sought after consultant for court cases, for both the defense as well as the prosecution. An out quote in the obit tells he was, "A gunshot expert who himself had been shot four times."

Further into the obit the reason for that perceived gunshot expertise is found in the following paragraph:

"He could bring firsthand experience to his expertise in gunshot wounds: He himself had survived being shot four times by his second wife in a fit of anger. They divorced."

Well, okay. But on what grounds?

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