A little over a month after Bob Saget tragically passed away at the age of 65 in a Florida hotel room, we finally have a clearer picture as to how exactly he died — and the answer is a harrowing reminder of just how serious head injuries can be.
Saget’s death was ruled an accident resulting from blunt force head trauma. Investigators believe he likely experienced an “unwitnessed fall backwards” in his hotel room and then, perhaps confused due to the blow to the head or simply unaware of how severely he had injured himself, he went to bed and died in his sleep.
However, the autopsy findings reveal that this was no ordinary bump on the head. The comedian suffered multiple skull fractures and brain bleeds. As People reports, Saget’s injuries included “posterior scalp abrasions, subgaleal hemorrhage (blood that forms between the skull and scalp), discoloration in the upper and lower eyelids due to skull fracture, subdural hematoma (buildup of blood on the surface of the brain), and subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding in the space surrounding the brain).” Damage to his skull included fractures above his eye sockets.
The severity of those injuries has led many to wonder whether it’s really possible to suffer that much damage by simply, say, slipping in the bathroom and hitting your head on the floor. Many doctors — none of whom, it must be stressed, actually examined Saget themselves — expressed surprise, likening his wounds to those one might sustain in a car crash or by being hit in the head with a baseball bat.
“That takes a lot of force to do that,” CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said on the air on Friday. “When I first saw this, if I knew nothing else about what had happened, you would think this was maybe someone who had fallen down the stairs and had several impacts to the head or been unrestrained in a car accident.”
“This is significant trauma,” Dr. Gavin Britz, the chair in neurosurgery at Houston Methodist Hospital, told the New York Times. “This is something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”
Dr. Joshua Marcus, a neurosurgeon at Nuvance Health, told People that it’s the fractures around Saget’s eye sockets that raise the most questions for him, given that they’re not something you’d necessarily see in someone who fell and hit the back of their head.
“There are people who fall from standing and have things that look just like traumatic injury,” he said. “The thing that’s tougher to track here are the fractures. To have a fracture, you have to have enough blunt force on a bone — directly on a bone — in order to fracture it. It’s very hard to fracture your orbit [bones in the eye socket area] without traumatizing your orbit.”
Naturally, all of this speculation has raised questions over whether investigators failed to pick up on some sign of foul play. The chatter got so bad that over the weekend that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department took to social media to reiterate that they don’t believe Saget was murdered. Sheriff John Mina said that there were no signs of a struggle and noted that the comedian’s injuries were most likely sustained when he fell and hit the back of his head on a hard surface — most likely the bathroom floor or tub. “We do not believe he was struck by anything,” he said.
It’s easy to latch onto conspiracy theories, but the sad reality is that accidents like Saget’s are far too common, and it’s important to remember that head trauma is no joke. If you fall and/or hit your head, it’s crucial that you use an abundance of caution and seek medical treatment if necessary. It’s always a good idea to get checked out after a head injury, but doctors recommend going to the ER immediately if you experience blurred vision, a severe headache, nausea or vomiting, or stroke-like symptoms following a blow to the head.
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