Penetrating skull stab.

Abstract

Fatal skull stabs are rare. In the case reported here, a 28-year-old man sustained an isolated penetrating skull injury from a knife and died two days later. The bone shard with the stab puncture, which was neurosurgically removed before death, later allowed the reproducible exact assignment of the murder knife found at the scene to the stab as well as the estimation of the length of the intracranial stab channel. This, together with the findings of the formalin-fixed brain, allowed forensic reconstruction.