A death now in question. Did a Covington teen shoot himself?
The pathologist who performed the autopsy on 14-year-old Brett Wittner is the newly-elected controversial coroner, Dr. Christopher Tape.
Ballistics evidence uncovered and reviewed as part of a WWL Louisiana Investigation could blow a 2012 cold case wide open.
Brett Wittner, a 14-year-old from Covington, was shot the morning of Feb. 25, 2012, at the tail end of a sleepover with five girls and two other boys in rural Washington Parish.
Investigating authorities accepted witness statements that Brett had shot himself accidentally – with one shot from a .22-caliber long rifle to the right side of his head, above and behind his ear.
An autopsy report backed that up, stating that just one bullet was found inside Brett’s head. The report said the single bullet was shot at contact range and was recovered in a “minimally to moderately deformed” state, from “within (a) skull defect” on the front left side of Brett’s head.
The pathologist claimed that when he pulled back Brett’s scalp to view his cranium three days after the shooting, he found the bullet lodged in the exit wound on the front left of his skull. But in hospital scans taken just three hours after Brett was shot, a bullet is visible in the back of Brett’s head, far from the exit wound location.
Dozens of lead bullet fragments are also visible in the scans, leaving a trail across the bullet’s trajectory through Brett’s brain. A ballistics expert in Sweden who reviewed the scans for WWL Louisiana found those fragments added up to the mass of a whole .22-caliber long rifle copper-plated bullet.
But when the State Crime Lab weighed the bullet the pathologist recovered from Brett’s head, it was 91% of the weight of a whole bullet.
Something didn't add up
Something didn’t add up.
Brett’s mother, Donna, was always focused on the angle of the shot that went through her son’s head. She believed Brett couldn’t have shot himself with a rifle only a few inches longer than his arm with an upward and forward angle behind his ear.
For the last 12 years, newspapers, TV stations and YouTubers did stories about her concerns, all to no avail.
Then, two months ago, the pathologist who performed Brett’s autopsy, Dr. Christopher Tape, took office as the elected coroner of St. Tammany Parish – the Wittners’ home parish. Tape had run unopposed and won the election by default before WWL Louisiana exposed allegations of sexual misconduct against Tape.
The station also looked into concerns about Tape’s work as a private pathologist. WWL collected hundreds of autopsy photographs and brain scan images from Donna Wittner and shared them with leading scientific experts from around the world.
Those experts in ballistics, brain trauma and neuroradiology -- hailing from Sweden, Greece and New Mexico – say Brett was most likely shot twice in the head, not once. They say radiographic evidence shows a deformed, nearly intact bullet was lodged in Brett’s skull in the far back of his head, some 15 centimeters behind the spot where Tape claimed to have recovered it.
Dr. Jon Spar, a retired neuroradiologist from the University of New Mexico was the first to identify the discrepancy, rejecting the idea that the same bullet could have blown out the left side of Brett’s skull and somehow “migrated” under his scalp and lodged back into his skull much further back.
“I think that's a second bullet. And it speaks to me that it … would have to be a separate person shooting at the victim,” Spar said.
Dr. Panagiotis Stefanopoulos, a maxillofacial surgeon who did ballistic trauma research for the Greek Army, also reviewed the images and scans. He and Spar both theorized the bullet in the back of Brett’s head could have entered after a ricochet or at such an oblique angle that it didn’t have the force to penetrate the skull.
“The first bullet left Brett unconscious,” Stefanopoulos said. “So, there was a second shot from someone (else), which was the bullet that killed him eventually.”
Bo Janzon, a Swedish ballistics professor and founder of the International Ballistics Society, wrote a full analysis of Brett’s case for WWL. He found it’s impossible for the bullet recovered at the autopsy to be the same one that passed through two layers of Brett’s skull and across the full width of his brain.
The recovered bullet “is only deformed (mushroomed) in the way you would expect if it had impacted only soft tissue, which is the effect that a hollow-point bullet is designed to produce,” Janzon wrote.
That recovered bullet weighed 32.6 grains, according to the State Crime Lab. That’s just 3.4 grains less than 36 grains, the listed weight on the box of .22-caliber, copper-plated, hollow-point, high-velocity bullets found at the scene.
“The bullet that penetrated the skull has, most likely, completely disintegrated,” Janzon added.
He said that’s typical for these kinds of bullets if they pass through one layer of scalp, two layers of skull and 15 to 20 centimeters of brain matter.
Janzon also used the measured weight of the recovered bullet and an image analysis program to calculate the estimated mass of the bullet fragments visible in the CT scans. He said the total mass of the fragments in the entrance wound, across the trajectory through the brain and in and around the exit hole in the opposite side of Brett’s cranium, “with great certainty, will amount to the full weight of a cal. 22 bullet of 36 grains.”
Experts concern
These experts’ main concern with the two-bullet theory was that only one entry wound was noted in medical records and in Tape’s autopsy. But the full array of autopsy photos collected by Washington Parish doesn’t include any unobstructed views of the far back of Brett’s head.
The autopsy photos show only one small area of Brett’s thick hair was shaved to reveal the known gunshot wound behind his right ear. Also, there are no photos of a rear view of Brett’s skull after retracting the scalp.
Tape was a private forensic pathologist near Lafayette at the time of Brett’s death. The Washington Parish Coroner’s Office doesn’t have its own pathologist on staff and outsourced Brett’s autopsy to Tape.
Tape moved to St. Tammany Parish last year, just a few months before running for coroner without opposition.
Voters are now trying to gather about 37,000 signatures from registered voters to recall Tape from office, a campaign that launched based on our WWL Louisiana investigation in February that exposed a 2002 indictment on child sexual abuse charges involving a 7-year-old girl and a 2022 settlement Tape paid to a 26-year-old female employee after she accused him of making unwanted advances.
Donna Wittner says Tape’s autopsy report on Brett shows he should be removed from office, not only for the sexual allegations he faced in the past, but also for how he has performed the core responsibilities of his elected office.
“He should not be practicing medicine, and he should not be looking at anyone's bodies,” she said.
Asked if she thinks Tape could have made a mistake, Donna said, “No. How do you miss two bullets in a child's head? He even said that my son's brain was normal in some spots.”
Stefanopoulos said Tape’s autopsy describes parts of Brett’s brain as “normal” or “intact” even though the CT report by a radiologist at St. Tammany Parish Hospital observed extensive hemorrhages and deformations in those same areas.
Tape also claimed he recovered the mostly intact bullet from the location of the exit wound in front of Brett’s left ear, which he wrote was “consistent with the radiographic evidence.”
“This is also clearly wrong,” Janzon wrote.
Tape declines to address questions
Tape has repeatedly declined to address questions about the Wittner case, first from Donna Wittner herself and then from WWL Louisiana during an interview in March. He reiterated that position last week when asked about the scientific experts’ specific concerns about his autopsy.
"This case has been thoroughly reviewed by multiple agencies already,” Tape said in a written reply. “WWL-TV is not a court of law, and I'm not going to discuss or debate details of this matter in a public forum."
Pathologists from across the country comment
WWL also reached out to several forensic pathologists from across the country. A few said they agreed with Tape’s autopsy report on Wittner but declined to go on the record or explain why. Prompted by questions from the TV station last month, Washington Parish Coroner Roger Casama’s office asked Tape to review his Wittner report again and is still awaiting his response.
Washington Parish Chief Deputy Coroner Paul Thibodeaux said his office is reviewing the ballistics report from Janzon and other expert statements provided by WWL.
He also said the office asked a panel of independent medical examiners to review the case file. Some of those local pathologists urged WWL not to report on the two-bullet theory last week, prompting the station to hold the story to further investigate their concerns. Those pathologists said they were confident that one bullet passed through Brett’s head from right to left, went through the left side of his skull without breaking the skin and then migrated under his scalp to the back of his skull, possibly while he was being rushed to St. Tammany Parish Hospital.
“I would judge this as quite unlikely,” Janzon wrote.
The local pathologists declined to put their report in writing or to comment on the record. The experts WWL consulted from around the world stood by their findings of two bullets, saying the local pathologists’ theory was not supported by the CT images or the data.
Shooting raises questions
The circumstances surrounding the shooting raise even more questions. The Washington Parish Sheriff’s Office report notes that two spent shell casings from the rifle were found at the scene, but investigators never accounted for a second bullet.
The police report said Brett and another boy were in the kitchen with one of the girls at about 6 a.m. on Feb. 25, 2012. The two boys picked up guns left by the back door of the residence – a lever-action .22-caliber long rifle and a shotgun – and pointed them at each other, witnesses said.
The boy and girl who were in the kitchen with Brett both told police that Brett cocked the lever on the rifle. The boy and the girl both said they were no longer looking at Brett when they heard a shot, then looked to see Brett moaning on the floor, slumped over and bleeding profusely from his head.
The boy said he saw a shell casing on the floor near his foot after he heard the shot. Police found a second spent casing still in the action of the rifle.
In hours of witness interviews reviewed by WWL, police asked the kids if they had heard or seen someone shoot the gun earlier in the sleepover and they all said no.
Donna Wittner said doctors at the hospital who tried to save Brett’s life in the hours after the shooting showed her only one bullet wound – and she said it was in the far back of his head.
“I know what I saw with my own eyes,” she said. “I saw a hole in the back of my son's head. And then the autopsy comes out, and it shows something over here by the ear area, and I'm like, well, am I crazy?”
She said nobody ever told her there could have been two bullets in her son’s head until WWL told her last month.
“All I needed was somebody on my side with integrity and resources,” she said. “And I want to thank you David and WWL-TV for having the integrity and the compassion to stick with me and to tell the story they never wanted to tell.”
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