5 | Without Question

to fiction's violence.

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“The views and opinions expressed throughout this podcast are solely those of the individuals”

expressing them, do not necessarily align with the opinions or beliefs of the host or producers. I'm on a Zoom call with a woman named Anna, she's in a different state, she's a forensic pathologist, she doesn't know faith, she doesn't know Ryan, and she doesn't really know me.

But what she does know is autopsies, and right now she's sitting in front of Faith's autopsie, breaking it down for me, lying by line.

And what she's telling me would change everything about the way we've been looking at Faith's

colleagues. A beating cannot cause this, a bludgeoning cannot cause this.

“She was hit by a very large force all at once.”

All of the coloring of her injuries indicate that they were acute or recent and that she was alive when this impact occurred. The truck that he was in had some sort of aftermarket brush guard type situation going on that could be investigated and see if it, you know, correlates with that linear abrasion on the backs of her legs.

Yeah, I can't fathom that.

That leads me to believe that they think this might come open again. I don't believe that any other scenario is possible to me, it's vehicular homicide versus accidental hit and run. Without question. Right after you know our last message, I managed to get a copy of Faith's autopsie report.

And things aren't really adding up for me, I mean, I have a lot of questions and I am no medical professional, but it just screams that something isn't right. I was wondering if you knew if the family or anybody have gotten an independent review.

“And I mean, I think, when you sit down and you look at this, you'll see it yourself.”

I don't think this is an accident, I just don't think it's an accident. I sit down at my desk with a copy of the report Rosemary sent me, open on my laptop. Notice of the chief medical examiner, case number 2101939, the Seedon, Faith, Morgan Ealy, 8 pages long, was a death multiple blunt force trauma, due to probable automobile versus pedestrian, manner of death, accident.

Two of those words stop, probable and accident, but it's the absence of words that has me truly confused. As Amanda's mentioned before, there's no road rash, there's very little in the way of secondary injuries at all, almost nothing you'd expect to see in an automobile versus pedestrian collision, particularly one that occurred on a rural highway with a speed limit

of 65 miles per hour. You don't get hit at that speed without catastrophic body-wide damage. And the file I have in front of me describes nothing like that. If the truck's doing the speed limit, then it's not getting there, like the odds of her getting there at the same time as the truck does, is slim, because not only is she somewhat

an e-bredder, but she's walking barefoot, you know, she's not in sneakers, she's not running, so it's going to take her. The better part of that 12 to 18 minutes rather than the lower part. Exactly. And you know, in the medical examiner's report, there was nothing notable on the bottom

of her feet. If she was doing a wrist walk, you would expect to see some possible bruising in me because you know, she's walking barefoot on in some brambles and it's just, you know, it's but it's not, it's not, you're not walking on the sidewalk, it's not even, it's on a slope, you know, a down on the side of the highway.

So in fact, there's nothing notable on the bottom of her feet.

a little dirty.

It's a little odd, I would think you would see something.

Rosemary's right, things aren't adding up and they're more we sit with it, the less seems to add up. The is it possible for somebody to have that many broken ribs and blastrated screen, it's a horrible thing to think about. And I, it's horrible to think about seeing a normal talk about, but could you walk, you

know, in any distance with an injury like that? Right. So what we need is we need someone that has a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience in, in this kind of thing to look at the medical examins report and say to us, hey, this is possible, or this isn't possible and, and break that down for us.

“I think we need to find someone that can do that for us.”

Before I take this anywhere else, I need to speak to Amanda. I have a list of questions, like, I don't understand why this is a vehicle versus pedestrian, you know, why was there not more broken bones? And they just absolutely refuse to review. I mean, at getting no answers, I was having to do a lot of research on my own, like all

the way down to the medical aspects, you know, the diagram with the ribcage. So I could understand which ribs will broken, where's the spleen locate? How, how does this happen, you know, she's got a slight indentation, wouldn't that be something to take in consideration a right point of impact if your ribs don't do that just natural from a layman's everyday civilian, none of that made sense to.

Once I finally got to see what truly all the injuries were.

It still didn't make sense, who's right, shouldn't there, there are more? There are questions we really need to ask an expert to answer, because despite Amanda's requests, it's clear the state isn't going to do it. Luckily, I know someone.

“She's helped me out on all types of reports before, on other cases, and forensic pathology”

is her world. Just a side note here, she's still actively working in forensics. It's a tight knit in the street where everyone knows everyone, and for that reason, she only agreed to do this if she had full anonymity. So the voice you hear isn't her real voice, and she isn't going by her real name.

We'll just call her Anna. I'm sort of limited by the information I can ascertain from the autopsy report alone, I didn't have access to a voice, but I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. But I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. And I'm not allowed to do anything to the people.

And I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people.

“I'm not allowed to do anything to the people.”

I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm not allowed to do anything to the people.

I'm not allowed to do anything to the people. I'm sort of limited by the information that I can ascertain from the autopsy report alone. I didn't have access to photographs of the body or police reports. And my opinions on the case come from analysis of the autopsy report, evidence-based forensic literature, and my experience from working similar cases in the past.

Interopensia conversation with a preamble. She wants to make it clear that she doesn't have all of the information that it supports. The thoughts and opinions are only based on the one document she does have, the medical examines report.

thorough investigation of a pedestrian versus vehicle case relies heavily on findings at the scene and on the clothing. So my first impressions of the report, part is that such information is sort of limited. We dive head first into the detail of it. You know the cause of death in this case is blunt force trauma which can occur in a variety

of death scenarios but almost always in traffic fatalities.

So forensic experts or police at the scene will document scene findings, such as blood staining on the road, the presence or absence of glass car parts, the position of the body, the distance from the sight of impact, the road surface, skid marks, weather conditions, all these things help piece together the death story. So most of this information I did not have access to.

So what I love about forensic autopsy is that the body truly does tell the story and we can determine a lot from the deceit and spotty in this case. The most notable scene finding was present in this report and that is was in regards to the shoes or lack thereof. So she was barefoot when she was discovered with visible dirt on the souls of her feet.

versus vehicle death can signify the position that the person was in before or after they

“were hit as well as the velocity in which they were struck.”

So the shoes found at the scene being knocked off of a person is a sign of a high velocity impact and as far as I can see from the report, no shoes were recovered from the scene. So this would indicate that this would indicate that she was walking barefoot down the road and this indicates that she either left in a hurry or was possibly in distress. What was the weather like?

That would be more telling. Was it a cold evening? Was it warm? Was it raining?

I didn't see any weather reporting in this whole entire report and that would be very significant

especially to the vehicular aspect of this as well. Yeah, right, it was I just had a quick look, it was 56 around 56 degrees. So that's a little, that's a little cool to just be out walking barefoot down the road. Unless she was, was that her habit? Was she a barefoot walker?

Did she, you know, if that wasn't something that she did regularly then I would call that out of the ordinary? Anna goes on to drop one of the many bombs that explode during our conversation and it's one that takes me completely by surprise. When we're talking about vehicle versus pedestrian cases, we talk about primary injuries

which are injuries due to the body hitting the vehicle and then we have secondary injuries

which are caused by the body hitting the road and the surroundings. So the injuries in this type of case are produced in a progressive manner upwards from the sight of impact and typically start at or below the knee. The height, weight position at the time of impact and road conditions speed all factor into the physics of this.

Almost conclusive evidence of an auto pedestrian collision is a spiral fracture of the lower leg called a tibia fibular fracture. So this is a spiral fracture of the bones originating below the sight of impact on the weight bearing leg. So by analyzing this type of fracture, we can determine if the pedestrian was struck by a vehicle.

And whether or not they were standing still or walking when they were hit. The most notable thing about faith's autopsy to me is that she did not sustain this type of fracture. Forensic literature will show that the tibial fibular fractures occur in about 97% of cases where the vehicle is traveling over 25 miles an hour and 40% of the time when the vehicle

is traveling under 25 miles an hour. So the absence of these fractures in face's case may indicate that the vehicle in question was traveling at a much lower rate of speed than the posted 65 mile an hour speed limit. 97% of pedestrians hit it over 25 miles an hour, have this fracture, 97% and faith doesn't. And that says if she was hit by a vehicle, then the vehicle that hit her was driving somewhere

under 25 miles per hour on a 65 mile an hour highway. And that poses the question, how does someone accidentally hit another person on the edge of the highway going 40 miles an hour under the speed limit on a straight road on a clear night with full visibility. When we get to her actual injuries, she had multiple left-sided rib fractures of the anterior

and posterior ribs along with left-sided hemothorax. So about 1,200 cubic centimeters of blood was collected from her chest cavity and that internal bleeding along with the last duration of her spleen were the primary injuries and the cause of her death. And this is caused by a high velocity impact.

“In terms of high velocity, is there a definition of what would be considered high velocity?”

So something can have a higher velocity if it's big and heavy and be traveling at a lower speed. I believe that her injury showcased this type of phenomenon, something large and heavy but hitting her at a lower speed. So still consistent with a vehicle?

Oh, 100%. We talk about the injuries that she had. They were all on the left side. So she had multiple left-sided rib fractures and when I say anterior posterior, that means in the front and the back, they were broken and the blood that was collected so that internal

bleeding that can only be caused by a very high velocity impact. A beating cannot cause this, a bludgeoning cannot cause this. She was hit by a very large force all at once.

“Can you tell from this report whether that was initiated from the front or the back?”

Yes. She had more posterior rib fractures than anterior which indicates that she was most likely

she had the absence of those lower leg fractures.

“So she was hit first, the impact hit her in the chest.”

It was probably a high floorboard car like an SUV or a light truck. So it takes a ton of force to break ribs on both sides and to last to rate the spleen that's going to be caused by the high velocity and the weights, sort of this shaking up the internal organs that happens when you're hit by a large force. There's a single line in the autopsy report, I haven't mentioned it.

It's easy to miss, tucked into the evidence of injury section. There was a linear abrasion noted on the backs of her legs which is an example of a pattern's abrasion which is common and transferred usually by a sliding movement of a narrow object. So in this case it likely could have been part of the vehicle and likely something like a brush guard.

So if the truck that he was in had some sort of aftermarket brush guard type situation going on that could be investigated and see if it correlates with that linear abrasion on the backs of her legs.

“So essentially the internal blood loss of like 1.5 liters that was only about 30% of her blood”

volume. So that is within fatal range but also a survivable injury if it would have been treated promptly. Survival if treated promptly.

I sit with that for a second, just breathing and trying to process it.

It's a devastating thought. I don't see any friction or grinding injuries so I don't think that she was dragged by the vehicle and typically if a person is hit while they're standing, they are thrown clear and not run over typically. I don't see any evulsions to the body so I don't believe that she was rolled over with

the vehicle. And then about 20 minutes into our call, Anna lands on something we've all been wondering about. Could faith have died elsewhere and been moved. So there is this phenomenon called labor mortise and so if a body is on its back, for

example, when they die then their blood will pool to the back, the posterior. And they'll have this like perplish coloring called lever and it's sort of like a pooling of the blood and you can tell the position of a body when they die or after they so if a person dies on their back, they're going to have that liver pattern on the backside of them.

Now, when someone is moved after death, they can have a secondary liver pattern so if someone dies on their back and they have a posterior liver pattern and then they're moved to their front, then you can see a secondary pattern sort of show up. Now I didn't see anything noted in the report about liver at all so I would have to go back and look.

It is there at some page two and it was posterior. There's nothing about a secondary life. I've looked back through my notes as we talk, trying to find what I'd written down when I'd spoken to Caitlyn about the night faith died when she'd arrived on the scene. I find what I'm looking for.

Caitlyn told me that when she first arrived, it looked like faith had simply laid down

on her side and gone to sleep, who needs were facing away from the highway and her back was facing toward it. She wasn't laying on her back, she was on her side, yet the levidity was fixed posterior and there was no note of a secondary levidity. Caitlyn goes on to explain to me that liver mortise generally starts to sit in around the

20-30-minute mark after death. It's visible around two hours after death and it becomes fixed and immovable at around the 6 to 8 hour mark. Faith's body was taken away from the scene by the medical examiner around midnight, roughly four hours after the official story has been hit by the truck.

Longer than it would take for levidity to be visible to the human eye, but not long enough for it to become fully fixed. And the levidity finding and what it means, poses a lot of questions, things that weren't a much deeper investigation. What it doesn't do, not right now anyway, is rule out the possibility that faith died

elsewhere and was moved. So your take as well is that without question, it's a vehicle, it's just without question. Right, okay, but it's not consistent with a vehicle traveling at speed. No. I ask you about something that's been bugging me from the moment I opened the report.

“How does the medical examiner come to the conclusion that this was an accident?”

Not homicide, not even undetermined, but an accident. Sufficient evidence is required in order to call a death a homicide. So the medical examiner in this case did not find sufficient evidence of homicide in order to rule in that manner, so the default sort of goes to accident. But I will say that there are cases where a medical examiner will change their mind.

comes out into the open.

“So if you're bringing more evidence out, they can always go back and re-lead and change”

the manner in the future.

So when the medical examiner ruled this is an accident, they weren't saying it wasn't homicide. So we're saying they didn't have enough to call it one. And the obvious follow-up is, "Well, who was supposed to give them enough?" Because the medical examiner doesn't investigate, he reads the body, the rest, the scene,

the witnesses, the vehicles, but supposed to come from the agencies on the ground. And it appears in the absence of any other evidence, the default is just accident. Looking at the detail of Faith's autopsy, I noticed something interesting. On the cover page in the bottom right-hand corner, there are two boxes side-by-side. One is the date the case was initiated.

The second is the date the case was finalized, and there's a 10-month gap between the dates. 10 months.

“On a case the OSPI was already calling a clear cut-hidden run by early April.”

Your autopsy was matched through you, microscopic exam April 9th. This ecology came back in June, and then the file set there, for seven months before someone signed it. Somewhere in the middle of our call, I mentioned to Anna, almost as an aside, that OSPI

never went to the property.

The one she was sitting at the front of, 30 minutes before her body was found. They didn't go to the house. Yeah, at all. That's almost unheard of, I mean, I can't, yeah, I can't fathom that. No, it blows my mind every time I, yeah, I just blows my mind.

I don't know why, but they didn't, they, not only did they not go to the house that night. They never went to the house. They never looked at vehicles at the property, they just never went there.

“Yeah, well, I did some investigation into the systems in Oklahoma, and it seems as”

if they're, I mean, their medical examiner system is not accredited by the national standards, and they also back in 2014 were performing double the recommended number of autopsy per year that is recommended for a single doctor to perform. And in 2009, they lost their accreditation due to the, due to the poor conditions of the department's building and low staffing.

And you know, to this day, the state has not regained its accreditation. It's an unfortunate fact that the quality of death investigations relies a lot on proper staffing, training and budgeting of its investigating agencies. But if that's the state of their medical examiner's office, that probably leads over into other state run agencies as well.

Later in our conversation, we come back around to the toxicology report. The report shows that faith at a combination of narcotics and their system and the toxicology tests were performed. She had a blood alcohol level of 0.11 and she tested positive for both and fedamine and methamphetamine.

Less than 0.25 micrograms per milliliter of infidamine and around 1.2 micrograms per milliliter of methamphetamine. Faith's blood alcohol level was above legal driving limit, and her levels of methamphetamine were without a doubt high. In terms of endphetamine levels, the levels of relatively consistent with someone who might

take riddle in order at a role to treat ADHD, which faith was diagnosed with. Enter and I look at it in the context of faith's death, and whether it could have potentially played a part. This is where the toxicology might play a factor, because when someone is under the influence of alcohol, they are more likely to bleed internally, and so essentially she died from

that blood loss of that blood that was recovered out of her chest cavity. So she bled out internally, and so the toxicology findings probably would accelerate that process on some level. And also the methamphetamine in her system that's going to put a much greater stress on her heart, and so that also could be a contributing factor to sort of that injury.

If her heart is already under the stress of combating the intoxicance that she is under, plus it's causing her to bleed more, readily that combined with the injuries, it was probably

all of those things combined, which ultimately caused her death.

I tell another something else in relation to the toxicology test in the M.A. report that struck me as odd. In cases like this, toxicology samples are typically held for 30 to 90 days, then disposed off. In faith's case, it turns out someone put in a request for them to be held for five years.

That leads me to believe that they think this might come open again, that there could

If they thought the case was shut and closed, they would probably dispose of those samples.

So the only time that we would put a hold on specimens in these type of cases would be because it could be investigated as a homicide in the future, especially of five years. It's a significant time to hold a sample. I ask the M.A. who put the hold on and why, and while they can tell me it was the pathologist office who requested it, they can't tell me exactly why.

But something pops in the back of my mind is Anna and I are talking. I remember back to the list of law enforcement agencies who were on the scene that night. The seminal county sheriff's office, Oklahoma Highway Patrol, who worked up police department, the seminal light horse police department, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the District Attorney's drug task force.

It never made sense to me why they would have been there that night, and I can't help

but wonder. Could the hold on faith toxicology results have something to do with whatever reason they were there that night? Anna tells me faith samples were logged on March 31st, 2021. Five years from that day, March 31st, when he 26, was about two months from now.

Whatever the reason for those samples to be held for five years, whatever was being preserved for a day someone might want to take another look, that window is closing. There's a clock on this, and it seems like nobody hit the start on it, but us. It's a few days after my call with Anna, and I find myself driving on a rural highway, thinking about faith.

I'm thinking about the 30 minutes between when faith was last seen alive, at 802pm walking south and highway 56.

And when the first 911 call came in, at 829pm, Anna's told me what her interpretation

of the autopsy says happened in that window. She's told me what she believes couldn't have happened, but there's one version that we haven't put to it yet, and it's the version that, in five years, has shaped the entire investigation. Rions.

I give Anna an abbreviated rundown of Rions' version of events. In short, he sits with faith on the truck's tailgate after the altercation, goes inside to check on his mother, comes back out, and sees faith walking down the highway, 10 minutes later, and truck passes with a light trailer, then he hears a sound like a trailer going

“over a speed bump, and that's what makes him grab the flashlight and go looking.”

I ask Anna for her thoughts. A couple of things stand out to me the timing of that, I mean, I'm hearing a, it doesn't make sense that he would have heard a sound of a truck passing over a speed bump because she wasn't run over, so that is a strange thing to report. It's also strange to me that they're sitting in the back of the truck, and he's sort of

making that association with the truck, and I'm just purely speculating on a non-scientific thought process. If he saw her walking down the road, it would make sense to me that he would follow her, that he would get in the truck that they were just sitting in, and maybe drive down the road and try and, you know, pick her up, I feel like that, yeah, is plausible.

I feel like that's possible, and that would, that would also, you know, fall in line with the much lower speed than the 65 mile an hour speed limit, so, you know, she wasn't hit at 65 miles an hour, so if he saw a truck going with a trailer going down the road

“at the speed, why would they have been traveling at, you know, below 25 miles an hour?”

They wouldn't have. So, the version Ryan told Lauren Forzman, the mystery vehicle, the trailer passing at speed, isn't one that Anna will put on the table. The vehicle that hit faith, if there was a vehicle, wasn't passing through, it was already creeping under the shoulder, in the dark, going under 25 miles per hour.

And my question is, if that truck was going 40 miles under the speed limit when Ryan saw it go by, wouldn't he have mentioned that to the investigators? You can easily tell the difference between a truck going 65 miles per hour, and one going 25 miles per hour, wouldn't that have been worth noting, because if faith was hit by a car, that's potentially the difference between an accident and flat out homicide.

I call Amanda to talk through it all, but before we get too far down the line, another call comes in on her end, and she patches it through.

“I'm my aunt's food calling, I'm going to merge her with you, do you get up to her?”

Hello, hey, hey, I have Troy on the phone with me, and I'll hear you, he's from the blunt horse trauma, the investigator I was telling you about, he's on the phone with us right now. OK, I was talking to Troy and letting him know some of the information that you had already given us, and I was also telling him about that threatening phone call, you told

Yeah, and I think it would probably, I think he would like to for you to tell him about

“it, and it comes straight from the horse to the mouth, though.”

OK, I understand that. Yeah, I'll tell you what happened, it's been back, I was back in January, in the January. I had spoken to my nephew, who is my husband, and if you're actually, um, he is well, as I, some of the county police officer in, we're located, and you know, I'll go

work with me on B-works for the questions, anyway, I had spoken to him, and he kind of

was telling me a little bit about what he knew about the case, you know, he didn't really

“know anything, and because he wasn't on duty that I couldn't face this fail.”

But he told me, he said, just make careful what you're asking questions about me and whatever I wanted, you know, to ask him, and then he told me, he's like, you know, don't have anybody asking me questions.

I'll answer you, but I want to answer him, I'll answer him, I'll answer him, I'll

answer him. Hmm. Uh, anyway, it wasn't, oh, maybe a week after I had spoken with him. Uh, my phone ran one night, and I'm like, I entered into no number, you know, and I, I wish I could.

The number I did not, uh, there was his man home phone, and he asked me if I

“was, so can I say, yes, and he goes, I want to inform you that you need to keep your”

mouth shut, but ask him questions and back off, you know, or you're not going to like, answer lenses. Faith's case is still open, and her killer or killers have not yet been brought to justice. If you know anything about faith, her death, or those who may be responsible, we'd like to hear from you.

Please visit at gospace.media/tips, and either leave a voicemail or send us a message. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at bluntforce trauma podcast. If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider our subscriber optional Apple podcasts, or [email protected]/acospacepodcasts, where you can access to early episode drops, ed free episodes, and bonus content across all of the echo space shows.

If you'd like to keep up to date with progress on faith's case, please visit and follow the justice for faith-easy Facebook page. You'll find a link to it in the episode notes. bluntforce trauma as a production of echo space, written and hosted by Troy Taylor, executive producers of Troy Taylor, Mark Terruley, and Fred Sherter.

The main theme song is "Lose My Mind" by Maya Davidoff, and the show also contains audio content from movie gratis.