VIDEO FOOTAGE OF A COMPLETE AND TYPICAL HANGING: ANALYSIS OF THE HANGING SEQUENCE

Investigating a body found hanged, without eyewitnesses, to determine the cause and manner of death can be difficult. Video surveillance footage can help document the events and provide useful data for the proper assessment of the case. The authors report the case of an 86-year-old man found suspended on the outer wall of his home and who died following the hanging carried out as a suicide. The images taken by the surveillance camera are useful for reconstructing the incident and to confirm that the cause of death is attributable to the hanging, without the interference of extrinsic factors. The sequence of events relating to hanging and subsequent convulsive movements typical of the last moments of life, as seen from the video surveillance recordings, does not seem to differ much from those described in the experiments reported in the literature. The reporting of this suicidal event has yet to be considered a significant isolated case study for the study of the human hanging process.