THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 5, 1994 TAG: 9412050056
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Dr. Faruk Presswalla is no stranger to controversy. Perhaps his most controversial case - the one with the greatest political overtones - was in 1978.
Presswalla was just starting his long tenure as Hampton Roads' chief medical examiner. He had been appointed two years earlier.
The case involved a well-known professor at Virginia Wesleyan College: Richard Lapchick, son of basketball great Joe Lapchick.
The professor was national chairman of a group combating racial injustice in sports. It fought especially hard against apartheid in South Africa.
One day in 1978, Lapchick, who is white, said two masked white men visited him at his campus office. Lapchick said the two men called him a ``nigger-lover'' who had no business in South Africa. Then, Lapchick said, the men beat him with file cabinet drawers and carved the misspelled word ``NIGER'' on his belly with a pair of scissors.
Police asked for Presswalla's help.
It was an unusual request. Normally, medical examiners study only corpses. In this case, however, Presswalla made an exception. He says he felt obliged to help, and not just because state law required it.
So Presswalla examined Lapchick in the hospital and announced his findings: The racial epithet was ``definitely self-inflicted.'' It was too neat, the letters too uniform, and the letter ``i'' carefully dotted. Also, Presswalla found, Lapchick's other wounds were minor and inconsistent with the professor's version of a brutal attack.
The findings prompted an international furor. A committee of 100 celebrities - feminist Gloria Steinem, author Kurt Vonnegut, singer Harry Belafonte and basketball star Willis Reed, among others - rallied to Lapchick's support. Other doctors disputed Presswalla's conclusions. Lapchick reportedly passed a lie-detector test.
The front-page controversy raged, then gradually died away.
There was no resolution. Police never found a suspect in the attack, but also never charged Lapchick with filing a false report. The professor defended himself to the end but never filed a slander suit against Presswalla.
Eventually, Lapchick left the college.
That left one outstanding issue, a private dispute between Presswalla and then-Attorney General Marshall Coleman that never came out publicly.
Because of his controversial findings in the Lapchick case, Presswalla says, he was forced to hire a private lawyer to defend himself. The attorney general refused to defend the medical examiner, saying that Presswalla had overstepped his bounds in this case.
For a year, Presswalla says, he feared a lawsuit by Lapchick. But one year later, when the statute of limitations ran out, Presswalla knew he could not be sued. It was then, Presswalla says, that he demanded that Coleman pay his legal bills.
Presswalla says Coleman refused, maintaining again that medical examiners should not be involved in cases with live victims. Finally, Presswalla says, House Majority Leader A.L. Philpott intervened and the medical examiner got his money. But the lack of support from the attorney general - then, as now - left a bad taste in Presswalla's mouth.
``I felt abandoned by the state,'' Presswalla recalls, ``when I went out of my way to do my duty.'' MEMO: Main story on page A1.
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA STATE EMPLOYEE by CNB