Charles Wetli

Charles Victor Wetli (August 27, 1943 – July 28, 2020) was an American forensic pathologist. He is best remembered for identifying all of the victims of the Trans World Airlines Flight 800 crash in 1996 as the Suffolk County, New York medical examiner. Though he faced considerable criticism from contemporaries for his handling of the investigation into the crash, he was later praised for his ability to identify every victim's body. According to Christine Negroni, Wetli "...should be remembered as a pioneering forensic physician who assembled an array of dentists, X-ray technicians, pathologists and tiny samples of DNA to put a name on every bit of human remains recovered."[1][2] He is also noted for proposing the controversial concept of "excited delirium" in a 1985 paper that he co-authored describing seven sudden deaths among female black sex workers who had recently used cocaine. He claimed that the deaths could not have been due to homicide, though they were subsequently found to be victims of a serial killer, and the scientific validity of the concept of excited delirium is generally rejected.[3][4]