Medical experts say it's impossible for person to break own spine in back of van

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But if Freddie Gray was trying to break his own spinal cord in the back of a van, according to experts in spinal trauma injuries, it might be the first self-inflicted injury of its kind.

“I have never seen it before. I’ve never seen somebody self-inflict a spinal cord injury in that way,” says Anand Veeravagu, Chief Neurosurgery Resident at Stanford University Medical Center who specializes in traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries.

“It’s hard for me to understand that, unless those terms [like ‘intentional’ and ‘injure himself’] are being used incorrectly. It’s hard for me to envision how a person could try to do that,” he says. “It would require them to basically hang themselves in a car where there isn’t anything to hang yourself with.”

"Unless somebody jumps off a two-story building and the blunt force breaks (their spinal cord), then no, it is not a viable solution to think someone did this to themselves," says Harminder Singh, a Clinical Assitant Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford School of Medicine.

Veeravagu says that there are only a few ways you can injure your spine in a similar way to the injuries that ultimately led to Gray’s death. One, he says, is by a sharp injury, which is a direct penetrating injury—either somebody with a knife “who knows what they’re doing, or something else that cuts through, like a gunshot wound.”

The other way, more pertinent to Gray’s case, is by trauma, where the bones are fractured and the ligaments are torn as a result of force or impact.

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