A forensic pathologist told jurors Monday that skeletal remains recovered from a Yigo ranch in 2021 area showed evidence of blunt force trauma from head to toe, and that the death was a homicide.
Dr. Mark Ishikawa, a board-certified forensic pathologist contracted from Hawaii, testified in Superior Court of Guam that after an anthropology review, he ruled the 2017 death of former Navy petty officer Adam Messier was due to blunt force trauma.
Prosecutors allege defendant Donavan Elliott Alianza Carriaga helped kill Messier, conceal his death and dispose of his body. He is charged with complicity to commit murder as a first-degree felony, with a special allegation involving the use of a deadly weapon.
Carriaga, his late father Jason Alianza, his brother Curtis Blas and Brandon Flaherty allegedly killed Messier in September 2017 and buried his remains. Carriaga was arrested and charged in 2021 after a witness tip led Guam Police Department officers to human remains in a Yigo ranch area, reviving the cold case.
While prosecutors say that Messier was allegedly beaten to death inside a Dededo condominium bathroom, placed in a plastic storage box and buried in the jungle, defense attorneys counter that their theory depends on witnesses who have motives to shift blame away from themselves.
The trial approaches on its fourth day before Judge Alberto Lamorena and is expected to last about two weeks, with Carriaga facing life in prison if convicted.
Before turning to the remains, prosecutor John David Griffin established Ishikawa’s qualifications for the jury.
Griffin then moved to have Ishikawa recognized as an expert in forensic methodology. With no objection from the defense, Lamorena accepted him as an expert witness.
Ishikawa examined the remains on Nov. 7, 2021, at the Guam Chief Medical Examiner’s Office, after traveling in from Hawaii on contract to perform autopsies.
He said Guam staff told him there was a case that needed examination and that the remains were held in a refrigerated mobile unit adjacent to the facility before being brought to his exam table. He said he did not sign any receipt for the remains and did not alter local protocols.
“Because there’s a lot of handling of the remains that can happen with different intermediate entities before I arrive, we always do a photograph of the remains the first time I see it and the first time it’s received,” he said. “That was done in this case.”
Ishikawa first identified the initial “as is” photograph showing the remains inside a clear plastic bag bearing a Guam Police Department evidence label. He testified that the image depicted the condition of the remains when they arrived at the medical examiner’s office.
After the outer bag was opened, Ishikawa said investigators found multiple smaller, soiled bundles individually wrapped in separate plastic bags.
He described the condition bluntly.
“I would consider them soiled and heavily decomposed … I would describe these remains as complete skeletonization,” he said.
Inside the bundles, Ishikawa documented clothing, including shorts, and a small, separate metal jewelry piece. He also described various cables, electrical wires and cloth wraps used to bind the inner bags together.
“We consider everything in that bundle as potentially valuable and potentially having evidentiary value,” he said.
Several photographs were shown to the jury depicting bright colored wire bundles and cable ties, covered to what appeared to be in soil, removed from around the bags that contained bones.
As he unwrapped the bags, Ishikawa said he first saw a fragmented human skull inside one of the soiled black plastic bags.
Other photos showed different angles, including the underside of the skull base and a front facing view. Ishikawa told jurors to distinguish normal anatomy from traumatic injury.
“That large hole, what looks like a hole here, that’s an anatomic fossa,” he said, identifying the large opening at the base of the skull. “That’s not an injury. That’s the expected depression in the skull where it would connect the spine.”
What he pointed out next, he said, was not normal.
“All of those irregular areas are all fractures,” Ishikawa said. “There’s large deficits of the skull that are missing.”
Looking at a front-facing photograph of the skull, Ishikawa pointed out what he described as obvious fractures to the maxillofacial bones, referring to the bones of the upper jaw and face.
“So that’s the bones that involve the face, the nose, and the orbits. In that area, there, there are fractures here, some injuries,” he told jurors
Moving to the next photograph, Ishikawa explained that he had arranged the recovered bones on an examination table in what forensic pathologists call a skeletal survey. The process involves placing the bones in their normal anatomical positions to determine which bones are present, which are missing and whether the remains belong to a single individual or multiple people.
He testified that a skeletal survey is the first step in examining skeletonized remains because it allows investigators to inventory the bones and check for any duplicated skeletal elements that could indicate more than one person’s remains are mixed together.
He said the survey showed vertebrae, ribs, long bones of the arms and legs, parts of the pelvis, teeth and jaw fragments.
“In this photograph, I would say that it’s an incomplete skeleton, but that there are the majority of the bones here,” he said of one image. “Many of them are fractured, and that there’s no evidence of a duplicated person.”
Under questioning from Griffin, Ishikawa said that by the end of his Nov. 7, 2021, exam he knew the bones showed “obvious trauma,” but he could not yet give a final cause of death.
“At this time of the exam, I came to the conclusion that we had severely decomposed and skeletonized skeletal remains that had obvious trauma to them,” he said. “But my conclusion to be able to get to the cause of death was that I implored to the staff there that this case required a forensic anthropology consultation.”
He explained that forensic anthropology, which focuses on skeletal analysis and fracture timing, is an “ancillary study connected to forensic medicine” that forensic pathologists rely on in complex cases.
Ishikawa said he first asked if the Guam CME’s office already had an anthropology consultant. When told there was no existing relationship, he recommended Dr. Robert Mann, a senior forensic anthropologist in Hawaii.
He testified that Dr. Mann examined the remains in December 2021 and issued a typed report, which Ishikawa received about a month after his own Guam exam. He said he completed and signed his final autopsy report in about June 2022, incorporating Mann’s fracture classifications.
“After I received Dr. Mann’s typed report about a month after this exam that you saw the photographs from, I did at that time,” Ishikawa told Griffin when asked if he then had an opinion on the cause of death. “That opinion was that the cause of death was blunt force trauma.”