Five days after we published a story about disgraced former Tarrant County medical examiner Nizam Peerwani (“Examining the Evidence,” Mar. 3), an anonymous letter full of accusations about him landed in our office. The sender, going by the name Johnny Hacker, left a nonexistent return address and no documentation to support his claims, but we were able to verify several accusations, either through subsequent open records requests or past reporting.
Enclosed were two typed pages packed with intimate details about the inner workings of Tarrant County’s ME office, which is staffed by seven board-certified forensic pathologists who identify the cause of death in homicide cases, unattended deaths, and other situations where the reasons for the demise are unknown.
“Somebody needs to help with the Tarrant County coroner’s office,” the letter opens. “Dr. [Peerwani] is out of control, and things are falling apart. We can’t complain when he does something wrong. Peerwani is really getting senile, and he makes mistakes all the time.”
In the early March story that piqued Johnny Hacker’s interest, we examined government documents tied to Peerwani and found that he may have practiced medicine without a license early in his career before working as an appointed judge — the judicial title afforded to medical examiners by Texas’ Code of Criminal Procedures — even though he was not a U.S. citizen, contrary to rules set by Texas’ constitution. Our research that was aided by veteran watchdog...
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