There are no secrets on the autopsy table. Mysteries, perhaps, but no secrets:
"Multiple intricate black ink tattoos are present on the body, including a bird over the right upper-posterior shoulder, the name 'TIM' and the words 'HARLEY DAVIDSON FOREVER' over the right upper arm, a heart with a dagger and wings of the anterior right forearm, a tattoo of a woman with wings of the anterior left forearm, four tattoos of the left upper arm and onto the left upper posterior shoulder, including a skull, hawk and dragon, and intricate tattoos of the entire back with Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer, a castle, dolphins, an owl, and mountains."
Yes, they scoped him out thoroughly - weight, 240 pounds; length, 71 inches - and then they went to cutting. What they found was the anatomical record of a rough life.
The Sept. 16 autopsy report from North Carolina's chief medical examiner, Dr. Deborah Radisch, details head injuries sustained by Timothy E. Helms, notably three years ago while he was a state prison inmate.
Did those injuries contribute to his death two years later? "No complications of brain trauma with subsequent immobilization, such as pneumonia, urinary tract infection, decubitus ulcer [bedsore] with sepsis, or pulmonary emboli, were discovered at the time of autopsy," Radisch wrote. She concluded it was liver failure that got him, at 49 - failure probably due to advanced hepatitis C.
But the overall picture emerging from the report, which was a full year in the drafting, is of a man caught up and mangled in the gears of the prison system.
Helms was by no means blameless. Yet when the evidence points to a beating by correction officers, there should be a full, public accounting of the facts uncovered and determinations reached by those in charge. That has never happened. It's not adequate just to say, in effect, "We're stumped."
Helms' story has been laid out in The N&O, chiefly due to the reporting of Michael Biesecker. As a boy growing up in Concord, Helms was hit by a carpenter's truck and evidently suffered mentally impairing head trauma.
In 1994 he was involved in a wreck that claimed three lives. A head injury apparently occurred then as well. He wound up being convicted on three counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to three life terms, notwithstanding his mental state. At the time he'd lacked a driver's license; he later said that a friend who died had been behind the wheel.
At the state prison in Taylorsville, Helms was a troublemaker. He paid the price. Although Department of Correction policy is that prisoners should not be held in solitary confinement for more than 60 days at a stretch, Helms endured 571 days straight. That kind of treatment can lead somebody to commit acts of utter desperation. Officials say he banged his head against the wall.
And then came the fire in his cell, which he started with illicit batteries. Several officers dragged him out and took him where they were unseen by surveillance cameras. Then it was off to a hospital.
A CT scan - recapped in the autopsy report - disclosed "midbrain hemorrhage, right epidural hematoma, and left intracranial hemorrhage." Helms claimed at the time, and later when Biesecker was able to interview him, that officers had slammed his head into a wall and beaten him with billy clubs.
He was left partially paralyzed. He recovered sufficiently so that with help he could sit up. But at Central Prison and at a rehabilitation facility in Greensboro, his prospects remained grim. Radisch's report says that by August of last year, he "continued to experience agitation, delirium, depression, and suicidal thoughts, as well as chronic pain syndrome."
"The progression of his problem showed a stable, resolved static brain injury with increasing symptoms due to pre-existing liver disease," the report concludes. Respiratory arrest and death came in Greensboro on Sept. 5, 2010.
It's true that Helms had a history of head trauma prior to the incident at Taylorsville. So what the state did was to take a mentally impaired person who'd been sentenced to loss of his freedom and proceed to torture him, virtually, in the name of prison discipline. Then, when months of solitary had him so far gone that a cell fire seemed like a good idea, he ends up with incapacitating injuries.
The prison system, denying that Helms had been beaten, called in the SBI to investigate. But the investigation came up empty, at least as far as the public is concerned, because the findings have never been released.
We now know all about Timothy Helms' gallery of tattoos. We know what ailed him on the inside. Nothing is hidden from the medical examiners who dissect and describe, organ by organ. But our state government apparently wants us to be satisfied that a prison inmate can endure grievous injuries while in custody with no credible public explanation as to how they were caused. That is an outrage which the Helms autopsy findings fail to mitigate.
