Motorboat propeller fatal injuries: Case report, review of literature and use of three-dimensional scan in the investigations.

Source: PubMed, NCBI / U.S. National Library of Medicine

Motorboat propeller injuries are a rare, but highly fatal type of trauma. In this paper, a case of fatal motorboat propeller injuries is reported. The autopsy findings, including the retrieval of pieces of foreign material in the fractured skull compatible with the propellers of a seized vessel, supported the hypothesis of hemorrhagic shock resulting from severe injuries (both visceral and non-visceral) as the cause of death and a three-dimensional reconstruction and comparison between the body of the victim and the seized vessel showed a high grade of compatibility. A scientific literature review was carried out to analyse the most common features of motorboat propeller injuries to identify the presence of distinctive features which could help in cases of complex interpretation, reduced evidence or absence of eye-witnesses. A total of 5 articles reporting 10 fatal cases have been included in the review, showing that propeller injuries produce high-energy polytrauma with a mixed sharp-blunt mechanism and highlighting the distinctive feature of parallel wounds which can correlate to the distance between the propellers.