Autopsier telling all on TikTok

IN THE Morgue Have you ever wondered what it is like to perform autopsies?

Well, wonder no more. A Little Rock autopsy technician went to TikTok to answer questions about his job.

Don’t worry, there are no corpses or blood, only Gerald Ledford II talks about what it’s like to work in a morgue and interact with his TikTok followers, of which there are nearly 50,000.

Ledford, 43, is a hoot, offers humorous answers to sometimes unconventional questions, shares the reason “every morgue has hedge trimmers” and shows how a bone saw doesn’t cut tissue.

Some of his videos recently appeared on the LADBible Facebook page, where he was asked, among other things, what people almost always think is a lie in his job.

“That the bodies move,” he says. “I’ve been doing autopsies for 17 years and they don’t move. If they did, I’d be out.”

A question asked if there was “paranormal stuff going on” in the morgue was answered with a video of Ledford walking around with a sheet over his head.

Someone also asked if they could keep bullets found in corpses.

“No,” he says, adding that bullets become evidence and will be handed over to the authorities.

Ledford, a native of Kansas, moved his family to Hot Springs when he was five. He wanted to be a police officer and earned a degree in criminal justice from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He wasn’t that keen on confrontation, however, so he took a job as an investigator in the coroner’s office in Arkansas before moving to the morgue where he learned how to do autopsies.

He’s now working in a Little Rock hospital doing autopsies and helping with embalming in a morgue.

He started posting autopsy-related videos on TikTok about six months ago (you can find them at @ big_led73). After his first video came the questions.

The thing about moving bodies was his breakout, he says.

“This video exploded. In the comments section, people started fighting and arguing. It was like wildfire. “

Ledford’s friendly humor doesn’t turn into disrespect. He looks for “semi-serious questions that I can joke about. It’s an important job. I’m just trying to have fun with it, but I’m also trying to educate people.”

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