The autopsy of comedian Bob Saget after his sudden death at 65 has raised questions, with one doctor who has reviewed the results saying his injuries “appeared consistent with taking a baseball bat to the skull,” according to a new report.
Saget’s family summarized the findings of the autopsy after it was complete. “The authorities have determined that Bob passed from head trauma. They have concluded that he accidentally hit the back of his head on something, thought nothing of it and went to sleep. No drugs or alcohol were involved,” the family said shortly after his January 9 death.
But The Daily Mail reported on Monday that the autopsy report released Thursday “painted a grimmer picture about such injuries, noting that he fractured his skull in multiple places and sustained bleeding across both sides of his brain.”
“Health experts are now asking how thoroughly his death was investigated and what caused [sic] have caused Saget such a ‘significant blow to the head,’ which one doctor said appeared consistent with taking a baseball bat to the skull or falling 20 to 30 feet,” The Mail wrote.
The U.K. paper cited CNN’s chief medical reporter and neurosurgeon, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
“I think what it reveals more than anything else is this was not a simple bump on the head,” he said Friday on the network’s “New Day” program. “When you read this autopsy report that may still be the case, but it was a pretty significant blow to the head.”
A graphic shown on the show highlighted bones in Saget’s skull that were cited in the autopsy as being fractured, “which includes a stretch of bone from the front of his skull to his front temporal bone, in addition to fractures above his eye sockets,” The Mail reported.
“That takes a lot of force to do that. If I knew nothing else about what had happened, you’d think this was someone who had fallen down the stairs and had several impacts to the head or been unrestrained in a car accident,” Gupta said.
“Whatever happened here, we may never know how he fell or what happened, but it was a significant blow that caused that. And likely, the bleeding on top of the brain is likely causing pressure on the brain and subsequently, sadly, what led to him becoming unconscious and dying,” he said.
“This is significant trauma,” Dr. Gavin Britz, the chair in neurosurgery at Houston Methodist Hospital, told The New York Times.
“This is something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet,” he said, noting that Saget’s skull fractures were not only widespread, but in particularly thick parts of his skull.
