Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz, Chief Medical Officer at People Inc., shares insights into Clancy’s extremely low temperature
Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Lindsay Clancy was left paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from a second-story window following the killings of her three children in January 2023
- Some questions have arisen about how her body temperature dropped to 82.1 degrees Fahrenheit
- An expert tells PEOPLE her severe injuries, blood loss and exposure to the frozen ground contributed to her body temperature dropping
As the Lindsay Clancy murder trial continues, more information has been released about her physical condition following her suicide attempt.
Prosecutors have charged Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, with murder in the Jan. 24, 2023, deaths of her three young children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan. That day, according to prosecutors, Clancy asked her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, to pick up takeout food and a prescription.
Less than 30 minutes later, he returned to their Duxbury, Mass., home to find his wife injured after allegedly jumping from a second-story window. While calling 911, he discovered the couple’s three children dead in the basement.
Lindsay, meanwhile, suffered cuts to her wrists and neck, several broken bones and spinal injuries that left her paralyzed from the waist down. During the trial, Dr. Kelly McDonough — an emergency room physician at South Shore Hospital who treated Lindsay — testified that she was hypothermic with a core body temperature of 82.1 degrees Fahrenheit when she arrived. (Experts say it is unlikely her temperature was taken immediately upon arrival because she was in critical condition and required emergency care at a hospital that was some 20 miles from her home, adding to the time for any cooling.)
Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz, chief medical officer at People Inc., discusses how such a low body temperature could have occurred.
The “healthy range” for body temperature is between 97 and 99 degrees, Imtiaz tells PEOPLE, with slight fluctuations occurring depending on the timing of the day. However, he says the extent of Lindsay’s injuries could account for her suffering from severe hypothermia.
“The reasons why this would’ve happened is, she had a spinal cord injury, which then abolishes her regulatory defenses. Her responses in her body — we call it vasomotor responses — are disrupted so your blood vessels can’t constrict, which is how you conserve heat when it’s cold,” he explains. “When that mechanism isn’t working, the warm blood cannot be retained and body temperature can drop pretty quickly. She’s also losing blood and is in shock, which reduces your heat production naturally.”
Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty
Additionally, Imtiaz notes that Lindsay was lying on the ground in the snow, and direct contact with a frozen surface can drive heat loss. He says it’s also possible that a person’s temperature can continue to drop during transport to the hospital, even when medics are working to rewarm the body.
“When the medical teams start to rewarm, you can have continued cooling because you have this cold, pooled blood in the periphery, and that can lead to external cooling as well,” he says. “So it’s medically coherent for someone who is losing blood, is shocked, a spinal cord injury, lying motionless on a frozen ground, followed by an extra afterdrop during transfer, you can lose that three to five Fahrenheit per hour quite easily.”
However, Imtiaz notes that because the precise time Lindsay’s temperature was taken is not known, there has been confusion surrounding it.
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Imtiaz adds that while factors like Lindsay’s blood loss, spinal cord injury and conduction to frozen ground make sense for reaching 82.1 degrees, “the physiologically coherent explanation depends on [the] cooling interval.”
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