The medical examiner knew a Kingsessing shooting victim had died earlier than the others, but didn’t tell police for several days

A day after the July 3 mass shooting that police said killed five people in Kingsessing, the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that one of the victims had been shot to death at least 30 hours before the others. But for days, the office did not inform law enforcement officials of that finding, which clashed with the police narrative of events.

It was four days before law enforcement officials learned that Joseph Wamah Jr., shot to death in his house on 56th Street, had been killed well before the shooting rampage in which police say Kimbrady Carriker killed four people and shot two others. They were told only after a prosecutor contacted the Medical Examiner’s Office on July 8, as authorities were reexamining the timeline of the crime.

The reason for the lapse in communication is unclear, but it caused confusion about the sequence of events in a high-profile crime and was the latest misstep in an investigation already marked by mistakes, including a mishandled 911 response on the night Wamah was killed.

The Medical Examiner’s Office does not always immediately alert police to autopsy results, law enforcement sources say, but they said that in this case, Wamah’s time of death was something they should have been told right away.

Cyril Wecht, a veteran pathologist and former medical examiner in Allegheny County, also said the office should immediately have informed police.

“That’s important information indeed, and it should have been passed on as soon as they saw that one body was dead much longer than the others,” he said.

Before law enforcement officials learned that Wamah had been killed in a separate shooting a day earlier, they provided the public with an inaccurate account of the crime and were later forced to revise the official timeline of events.

Constance DiAngelo, the city’s chief medical examiner, did not directly respond to questions about why the office didn’t immediately inform investigators of the autopsy results or take steps to revise the official law enforcement account of a shooting that made national news.

Law enforcement “can certainly call the office or email and discuss the findings with the medical examiner,” she said.

A spokesperson for the city health department, which oversees the Medical Examiner’s Office, said an assistant medical examiner told a prosecutor about the time of death finding on July 8. He said the office typically puts death certificate information into a state database about one to three days after completing autopsies, but said he was unsure if police had access to that database.

The District Attorney’s Office declined to comment, and a police official said only that he wasn’t sure when the Medical Examiner’s Office had completed its work.

Attempts to reach Wamah’s relatives this week were not successful.

Police have said the accused gunman took to the streets of his neighborhood around 8:30 p.m. on July 3, firing randomly at people and cars near 56th Street and Chester and Springfield Avenues. Carriker, 40, opened fire while dressed in body armor, wearing a ski mask, and armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a ghost gun, police said. Officers took him into custody that night.

Speaking to reporters near the scene, officials said Carriker had killed four people and wounded at least two others. But shortly after midnight, Wamah’s father, returning from a work trip, found his son’s body inside his living room on 56th Street near Springfield. Authorities concluded that Wamah had also been killed during the rampage, in part because the fired cartridge casings at Wamah’s house were the same distinct rifle caliber that officers had recovered at the other crime scenes nearby.

For several days, police said, they continued to operate under the assumption that each of the victims had been killed the night of July 3. But by later in the week, investigators began to question the timeline, said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore, in part because they couldn’t find any video of Carriker shooting at Wamah’s house.

By July 7, detectives learned that some neighbors on 56th Street were saying they’d heard gunshots outside Wamah’s house days before Carriker’s crime spree.

By the morning of July 8, Vanore said, a prosecutor called the Medical Examiner’s Office to see if the autopsies could provide any clues to corroborate — or debunk — that notion. That’s when investigators learned that the autopsy concluded that Wamah had been killed at least 30 hours before the July 3 mass shooting, he said.

When police belatedly learned that Wamah had died on July 2, they looked to see whether anyone on the block had called 911 to report gunfire.

Investigators at first could find no record of such a call, which struck them as odd for a shooting on a residential street, Vanore said. But they eventually discovered that a neighbor had called 911 about 90 minutes after the shooting.

The reason police couldn’t initially find the call is because officers were mistakenly dispatched to the wrong address — the 1600 block of North 56th Street, about three miles away from Wamah’s house on South 56th Street.

Police are now investigating how that mix-up happened. The officers sent to North 56th Street saw no evidence of a shooting, so a dispatcher reached back out to the 911 caller to seek more details. The caller said she was put on hold and eventually hung up. And over the next 44 hours, police said, no other neighbors on Wamah’s block reported hearing the shots or called to report bullet holes visible in his front door.

With the discovery of the 911 call and the autopsy findings in hand, police on Sunday were able to share the new timeline, and what they believed to be Wamah’s actual time of death.

Vanore, who said medical examiners typically “share every single thing with us,” declined to criticize the Medical Examiner’s Office for the delay in telling detectives Wamah’s time of death, saying: “I just don’t know how long that takes. ... I don’t know what their timing on that was.”