Death and non-lethal weapons: A case of homicide by penetrating injury without projectile.

Herein, we report the death of a man, approximately thirty years old, victim of a short-range shot to the thorax from a PIEXON JPX4, a hand weapon classed category D in France, said to be non-lethal. External examination of the lesion revealed characteristics similar to those of ballistic injuries. The autopsy found an intercostal wound that reached the pulmonary parenchyma and the pulmonary artery, with severe hemothorax.

Homicidal poisoning series in a nursing home: retrospective toxicological investigations in bone marrow and hair.

Homicidal poisonings remain rare and can be difficult to detect, especially in the elderly or in medical settings. In this atypical poisoning series, a young nursing assistant purposely poisoned thirteen residents of a nursing home and killed ten of them. The medications used were a mix of psychotropic medications (cyamemazine, loxapine, tiapride, risperidone, and mirtazapine), under liquid formulation, which were inducing malaise and coma.

Ocfentanil testing in hair from a fatality case: Comparative analysis of a lock of hair versus a single hair fiber.

In clinical and forensic toxicology, hair analysis offers a larger window for detecting drug exposure than blood or urine. Drug measurements are generally carried out using a segmented lock of hair, but few articles report the use of a single hair to document drug exposure. Nevertheless, single hair analysis can be very useful, particularly if only small amounts of biological matrices are available.

Fatality involving ocfentanil documented by identification of metabolites.

The use of new psychoactive substances (NPS) has rapidly increased over the last decade. In the last 4 years, producers increasingly appear to be targeting non-controlled synthetic opioids, involving fentanyl derivatives such as ocfentanil (OcF). Identification of metabolites is of major importance in the context of NPS use, as it could improve the detection window in biological matrices in clinical and forensic intoxication cases.