NYC Medical Examiner Reveals Why She Delayed Ruling Jeffrey Epstein's 'Clear-Cut Hanging' A Suicide

A New York City medical examiner who oversaw the 2019 autopsy of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein has broken her silence on the reason she hesitated to declare his death a suicide.

Dr. Kristin Roman shared that she would rather be certain than fast, and asked to conduct further investigations into the circumstances surrounding his death, but was told off.

It comes as a new document showed that one of the guards who was securing Jeffrey Epstein's cell googled for the latest update on him some minutes before he was found dead in his cell.

It appears the stakes were too high for Dr. Kristin Roman, the medical examiner who was in charge of Epstein's autopsy following his death by suicide in 2019.

According to a recently released federal document on the late sex offender, Dr. Roman said the reason she delayed declaring his death a suicide, even though it was pretty obvious to her, was because she wanted to be 100 percent certain he died by hanging in his cell due to the high-profile nature of the case.

In her explanation to federal investigators, she noted that it was "pretty clear cut" it was a suicide,  but she just couldn't call it immediately, and rather chose to carry out other investigations just to ascertain.

"If he had been a less high-profile person who there weren't people wanting to kill, I would have probably called it a hanging on the day of autopsy. But this was thoroughness that made me look for these things before I called it a suicide," she said, per the New York Post.

Epstein died on August 10, 2019, after he was found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, where he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

His official cause of death was ruled a suicide by hanging, but many speculated that foul play was at play here, which got more intense after his family's hired pathologist claimed that his autopsy indicated he could have been murdered.

It was because of this that Roman noted that she wanted to interview the person who found Epstein unresponsive before coming to a compelling conclusion.

"'Was he fully hanging? Where was he hanging?' That kind of stuff," Roman said of the questions she wanted to ask. "I would have been a little bit more circumspect if there had been another inmate in there with him who had made threats."

"But even knowing that … it would have been more for completeness rather than a big factor in making the determination," she added.

Roman was not allowed to speak to any of the guards nor go check out Epstein's cell before her call.

However, according to the recently released documents, she was very confident about her earlier ruling on his death.

The medical examiner noted that while she wanted an investigation, she didn't need one to know that it was a death by hanging.

"Even without an investigation, and although I wanted one, just because of the nature of the case, even without an investigation, this case, autopsy-wise, looked like a very clear-cut hanging," she added.

Meanwhile, a federal document showed that one of the individuals guarding Epstein that night searched for the latest update on him about 40 minutes before he was found dead.

Tova Noel was accused of falsifying records to claim she made her cell rounds every 30 minutes and raised eyebrows as she made an unexplained bank deposit of $5,000 10 days prior.

According to the New York Post, Noel searched for furniture online and reportedly missed out on completing her routine checks on Epstein, while her other colleague checked for motorcycles.

The guard searched for "latest on Epstein in jail" at 5:42 a.m. and then again at 5:52 a.m., raising questions about whether she knew something was coming.

The Epstein guard reportedly claimed that most workers in the Manhattan jailhouse failed to do rounds and falsified records about it, insinuating it was quite a common practice.

"I've never worked in the Special Housing Unit and actually done rounds every 30 minutes," she told investigators.

Noel also stated that she never gave out an extra piece of clothing to Epstein and said "no" when she was asked if she had a hand in his death.

The guard and her colleague were ultimately fired; however, criminal charges against them were also dropped.