These gets fairly deep into the weeds of the Whittington case. But one point that garnered a lot of discussion yesterday was just how the birdshot got lodged in or near Whittington’s heart.
What most people seemed to be saying yesterday was that the most likely possibility was that it was from a wound to the neck. Pellet goes into the neck, gets into an artery and then makes its way to the heart.
But Whittington’s doctors said yesterday that they had known there was a pellet lodged near his heart from the beginning. So that seems to complicate the migration theory.
Now the Times has an article quoting Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, saying that it is much more likely “that the pellet lodged in or touched the heart when Mr. Whittington was shot.”