By Tom Gantert
Legal News
Nathan Gross has seen many disturbing crime scenes in his decades as a police officer, medical examiner and cold case investigator.
So when he spoke to about 20 people at the NALS of Jackson County monthly meeting recently, he had to reassure the group that it was safe to proceed with lunch.
“I’m not going to talk about dead bodies while you are eating,” Gross joked.
Yet the details of the cases he worked over his 25 years are not for the squeamish.
Gross was a sniper on Jackson’s SWAT team and a traffic accident investigator for the city, as well as an undercover narcotics officer for both the city and the state of Michigan.
He retired after 25 years with the Jackson Police Department in May of 2012, and accepted a position as a cold case investigator for Jackson County a few months later.
“I just didn’t have any desire to go back to police work,” Gross said. “Once I got back into it a little bit, it was pretty rewarding.”
Also, for the last 14 years, he has been a medical examiner with Jackson County.
“I’ve pretty much done it all, I think,” Gross told the luncheon attendees.
Gross said that everyday citizens don’t understand the impact they can have on helping to solve crimes.
“People have a tendency to think, ‘What I know doesn’t mean anything,’” he said.
When he is driving around and sees something that doesn’t seem right, Gross said he is in habit of writing down the license plate of the car.
“You never know what is going to tip over the case,” he said.
Unlike his job as a police officer, Gross discovered that as a cold-case worker, he could just concentrate on that one case in front of him.
“I didn’t have to worry about getting called away to do something else,” he said.
Gross talked about a case in which it appeared a woman had died of a heart attack. However, four days after she was buried, the Medical Examiner’s office learned from the police that her checks were still being signed and cashed.
When the body was re-examined, the pathologist discovered petechial hemorrhaging under her eyelids.
Eventually, the grandson was convicted of suffocating the woman with a pillow.
“Unless there is a bullet in the head, you can’t walk onto a scene and say, ‘This is a homicide,’” he said.
Gross has witnessed some gruesome incidents in his career in law enforcement.
As a police officer responding to a domestic violence call, he arrived and witnessed the man shoot himself in the head with a shotgun in front of his children.
Gross arrived at one murder scene where the victim had been stabbed 52 times. The elliptical pattern of the blood spray mimicked the killer’s arm motion.
CBS’s “Cold Case” was about detectives solving old crimes, something Gross does in real life. He says the show is generally accurate. But Gross says shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation that exaggerate the technology available to investigators are unrealistic.
“The shows that are killing us are the CSI shows,” Gross said. “The general public thinks we should bring in these lasers and all these capabilities. I think it is a great show, but the problem is juries expect us to do that and we can’t do that.”
Gross, 52, graduated from Columbia Central High School and went on to the University of Toledo, where he played football. He was an interim at the Toledo Police Department when he was planning to go back to college to become a teacher. On the day he needed to pay for classes, he got a phone call and was hired as a cadet for the city of Jackson.
Twenty five years later, Gross said he was burned out from the grind of being a police officer and ready for retirement.
But then he got that call asking him to consider working on cold cases.
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