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A death now in question. Did this teen shoot himself?

The pathologist who performed the autopsy on 14-year-old Brett Wittner is the newly-elected controversial coroner, Dr. Christopher Tape.

David Hammer / WWL Louisiana Investigator

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Published: 6:40 PM EDT May 23, 2024
Updated: 9:16 PM EDT May 24, 2024

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.

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