Michael Kennedy suffered "instantaneous and incapacitating" injuries from his fatal crash into a tree while playing a game of football on skis at Aspen Mountain, according to an autopsy report.
Pitkin County Deputy Coroner Tom Walsh said Sunday that Kennedy would have been paralyzed from the shoulders down even if Kennedy had survived the head-on crash on New Year's Eve."This was a Christopher Reeve kind of" accident, Walsh said, referring to the fall from a horse that left the actor a quadriplegic.
The 39-year-old son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy fractured his skull and cervical vertebrae and severed his spinal cord, according to the report released Sunday by Rob Kurtzman, the coroner who performed the autopsy.
Two sets of drug tests found no trace of alcohol or drugs in Kennedy's system, the report said.
"Injuries were instantaneous and incapacitating and death was in seconds to minutes," the report said. A laceration on top of Kennedy's head was a half inch long.
Walsh said a helmet might have helped Kennedy survive the impact, but it would not have protected him from the spinal and neck injuries. Kennedy was buried Saturday in Massachusetts.
Time magazine reported that a senior Aspen Skiing Co. official had asked Kennedy's mother, Ethel, to try to stop the family from playing the dangerous game the night before her son was killed.
Last week, a former Aspen employee who spoke on condition of anonymity also told The Associated Press that the Kennedys had often brought their well-known family sport to the slopes of Aspen and had been warned about the dangers of the game.