5.9.07: Vik Muniz, Crime Scene Investigator

Artist Vik Muniz told an amazing story about a dead body discovered near their property in Brasil. Janaina and he have a remote farmhouse-type place in Minas, as well as studios in Rio — anyway, someone came to the door of the country place and announced that there was a body on the road to their house. The police were called and Vik went to look.

A young man was dead and he and his motorcycle lay at the side of the road at the end of a short skid mark. Vik, like a character on CSI, came to some immediate conclusions that he proposed to the cop. The cop thought it may have been an accident, but Vik said, “No, look, the bits of his brain are exploding out, if he’d had an accident they would be caved in” …and then Vik announced, “He was shot, and the killer was a friend of his.” The cop was shocked at his apparent jump to such a conclusion, but Vik’s statements were all reasoned out. He noticed that the dead kid had accelerated on his motorcycle rapidly from a standstill; therefore, he had stopped to talk to this person who had then killed him. He’d been shot in the back while trying to speed off, and then the assassin had delivered the coup de graçe, sloppily, as some young assassins can’t bear to look when they comply with that part of their assignment. That second shot, Vik noticed, was made at an angle which would have been impossible for the killer to be at if the victim was alongside the killer, so therefore the dead man must have already been on the ground when the shot to his head was fired. It was an assassination, not a robbery.

Vik recognized the young dead man, and said to us that he was not a good guy, implying he’d probably double-crossed some of his drug-dealing pals and that was likely the cause of his downfall. The lot then fell to Vik to bring the guy’s mother to ID her dead son, which he did, but when they both arrived back on the scene she attempted to fling herself on the body, which would have been destroying a crime scene — so Vik and the cop ended up wrestling with the mom in the dirt and mud to keep her from throwing herself on top of the body.