CARBONDALE, Ill.—Once again, the authorities in Carbondale and Jackson County have been caught hedging the information they’re releasing about a death in the college town.
In this instance, it’s again the situation in the February death of Pravin Varughese.
Pravin Varughese and friend
Originally it was presented that Varughese was at a party on Feb. 12 when he reported via social networking that he was being threatened with physical harm (the family has clarified that this was not the case; but he did send a Tweet about “bloody knuckles,” which has been largely misconstrued and which actually came about after he was trying to get an object that was holding a window open, and when he did, the window fell on his hand). Nevertheless, no one heard from him after that late-night post from the party; but when he didn’t show up the next day, his worried family (who live upstate) began their own investigation and had him listed officially as ‘missing.’ His body was found a week later in a wooded area behind Buffalo Wild Wings in Carbondale, on the city’s east side. Local authorities wrote it off as just another SIU student who’d gotten drunk or stoned or both and got into a place where he wasn’t familiar, couldn’t get out, and died there of exposure.
However, his family reported that his body appeared to have several marks on it consistent with a devastating beating. His mother, Lovely Varughese, is a nurse (several members of his family are in the medical field). They refused to believe the local authorities’ assessment that Pravin had merely been drunk or stoned, walked into the woods without proper cold-weather attire against the bitter cold we were experiencing on that date, and died of hypothermia.
Believing there was more to the story, the Varughese family hired their own expert upstate and, following the downstate autopsy and tox reports, had their own done. The upstate pathologist declared that there were no drugs or alcohol in his system at the time of death, and the family made that declaration.
The local authorities picked up on this and made a statement earlier this week that there was indeed alcohol in Pravin’s system…and that the family was wrong.
Carbondale police chief Jody O’Guinn
One of the comments the upstate pathologist is said to have made to the family was that Pravin’s vitreous humor—the fluid in the eyeballs—was untouched. This was remarkable to the pathologist, as that is the defining factor for substances in the system if other methods of determining substances (such as drugs and alcohol) have varying results. Substances stay in the vitreous humor in an amount that is nearly 100 percent accurate, post mortem. That tests weren’t conducted on the vitreous humor was a shock to the upstate pathologist. He conducted them, and found that there was no trace of substances in the body. There was, however, a trace amount of methyl alcohol. That was as a result of the liver putting forth that substance as decomposition set in, and it was definitive.
And that is most likely the inaccuracy or falsity O’Guinn is alluding to.
Apparently downstate authorities are used to making sure their bases are covered….but they are no match for REAL pathologists who are used to seeing this kind of thing every day and have no agenda.
But what’s the agenda here?
By all appearances, it’s a simple one: that local authorities are ensuring their jobs are secure, by making sure people don’t know how dangerous Carbondale really is. Deaths of college students (even in non-college settings, such as the Molly Young case), as well as residents of the town, have gone either unaddressed or improperly handled for the past several years, as issued in a previous post. Carbondale police have come under scrutiny, and that in turn has also brought reproach upon Jackson County Sheriff’s Department officials as well as Illinois State Police.
Enrollment is declining at SIU-C, and costs are on the rise. While the college officials are struggling to rectify this situation, police aren’t doing much to curb the presence of gangbangers coming down from the Cook County/collar counties on Amtrak, making drug sales, holding up convenience stores and occasionally killing someone….because to do so would admit that crime is out of control in Carbondale, and it’s fanning out as it grows more intense in downtown.
What can be done?
The police chief serves at the pleasure of the mayor with the approval of the council. It appears it’s past time for citizens of Carbondale to go to city council meetings and demand action, up to and including replacement of O’Guinn. His disingenuous statements following deaths or other serious crime in his city have almost become formulaic. Of course, demanding a replacement means that the same people will be responsible for appointing someone who might be just as bad as O’Guinn…in which case, it’s time to overturn the mayor and council in upcoming elections. The whole thing is a dire situation the likes of which most of the larger cities in downstate face: small-town mentality tasked with handling metropolis-level criminality. They just don’t know how to do it. So drastic change needs to come about…and only the people can do that.
It apparently depends on how many more deaths—or the type of person who is the victim, as in the case of the Varugheses, who had enough background to know there was more to it than meets the eye—will have to happen before that change becomes imminent.