COVINGTON, La. — After 12 years of unimaginable heartache and distress, Donna and David Wittner finally believe their prayers are being answered.
Washington Parish officials exhumed their son Brett’s remains this week for a new investigation of the shooting that killed him on Feb. 25, 2012, when he was just 14.
“I got to see my son again,” Donna said. It “wasn't in the way I wanted to see him. I just want to thank God for carrying me through this far. And I know that the truth is gonna finally be revealed. And that's all I've been wanting all this time was the truth.”
The investigation in 2012 found Brett could have shot himself accidentally, behind the right ear, with a long-barrel rifle nearly as long as his arm.
There were so many unanswered questions: How could Brett have shot himself at that angle? Why were there two spent shell casings found at the scene but only one bullet was recovered? Why wasn’t the owner of the guns questioned by police? Why did the autopsy report say the recovered bullet was found lodged in an exit wound in the front left of Brett’s skull when X-rays and CT scans from the hospital three days earlier showed that same bullet in a totally different location, in the far back of his head?
Donna and David never believed the investigation was handled properly. Donna protested for years outside the offices of the sheriff, coroner, and district attorney, to no avail.
“Anybody that had any type of position that could have done something ignored us,” David Wittner said.
Then, earlier this year, Dr. Christopher Tape was elected without opposition as the coroner of the Wittner’s home parish, St. Tammany. He was the Lafayette-based private forensic pathologist Washington Parish Coroner Roger Casama had hired in 2012 to perform Brett’s autopsy.
Tape is now facing a recall campaign by St. Tammany voters who were angered to learn from a separate WWL Louisiana investigation that Tape had been charged with child sexual assault against a 7-year-old girl in 2002, got the charges dismissed for a lack of a speedy trial, paid a sexual harassment settlement to a female employee in 2022 and then, as his first act as their coroner, decided to end the sexual abuse response program his office had been running for five Northshore parishes.
WWL reviewed several of Tape’s autopsies that had been questioned by families of the deceased. One of them was Brett’s. So, the station sent the autopsy photos and report and Brett’s medical records to experts in neuroradiology, neurology, gunshot wounds, and ballistics.
They all believed the evidence supported the possibility that Brett had been shot in the head not once, but twice.
Their analysis relied mostly on CT scans that only captured 5 mm slices of Brett’s brain, so it required some extrapolation. Swedish ballistics expert Bo Janzon, the founder of the International Ballistics Society, used mathematical calculations to determine that metallic bullet fragments visible in the brain scans could have added up to the weight of a whole other bullet, in addition to the one Tape recovered at the autopsy.
Other pathologists offered an explanation that backed up most of Tape’s findings, but they refused to put their names to it: It said a single gunshot could have gone through Brett’s head from back right to front left, exited the skull without breaking through the scalp, then migrated to the back of his head under the scalp while Brett’s body was being transported to multiple hospitals.
The mere possibility of two shots was enough to catch the attention of new Washington Parish Sheriff Jason Smith. He said there had been a number of shortcomings in the shooting investigation. Plus, he said if Brett had been shot twice in the head, it couldn’t have been a self-inflicted accident – it would have been a murder.
Smith announced plans to reopen the case on July 1, his first day in office. This Monday, he was in Covington for Brett’s exhumation. So was Casama, the 86-year-old coroner who had hired Tape for the first autopsy. Braving the scorching heat and shedding his white medical coat and tie as the hours passed, he assured Donna and David Wittner he intended to get them answers and bring them peace. Casama put his chief deputy, Paul Thibodeaux, in charge of the delicate exhumation process.
“Supervising this procedure is just in the best interest of justice,” Thibodeaux said. “And trying to find out the facts in this case, it's very important that we maintain that delicate hand.”
For four, withering hours in the blazing sun, a team of six workers carefully dug around Brett’s coffin, revealing a plastic burial vault, a crucial liner that managed to keep Brett’s remains mostly undisturbed for over a decade, even as the wooden casket within had shattered and collapsed.
“We had a bunch of what-ifs going in,” Thibodeaux said. “Like, what if the liner was not intact? What if the coffin wasn't intact? The liner was intact, fortunately. The coffin was not extremely intact, but it was intact enough to maintain everything the way we were hoping it would be.”
Forensic anthropologists from LSU’s FACES Laboratory provided important expertise about the best way to extract Brett’s remains without disturbing any potential evidence.
Donna insisted on watching up close as Thibodeaux peeled away a lining that covered most of Brett’s remains. Her son still had lots of hair on his head, his hands were neatly crossed and a dress shirt, green striped tie, and blue jeans still adorned his body.
“I’ve already seen things I should have never seen before, anyway,” she said. “You know, autopsy photos, something a mother should never have to look at herself. I saw the hole in the back of my son's head at the hospital.”
The most delicate part of the exhumation process came at the end, when the Thibodeaux’s team transferred Brett’s remains into a body bag, then lifted it on a gurney and loaded it into a coroner’s vehicle without causing any damage.
Thibodeaux then drove the remains four hours west to Beaumont, Texas, for a second autopsy. That was done Tuesday by Dr. William McClain, an independent pathologist at Forensic Medical Management. Thibodeaux said it would take 60 to 90 days to get McClain’s report.
On Wednesday, Thibodeaux drove Brett’s remains to Baton Rouge, where forensic anthropologists from LSU’s FACES Laboratory will examine Brett’s skull and skeletal remains, looking for anything the initial investigation might have missed.
“I think they did a very good job of handling everything and trying to be easy and take proper care and document and everything,” Donna Wittner said. “So, I hope it stays that way throughout the investigation.”
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.
