The sons of a hospital executive and his wife have hired a famous crime expert to help investigate their parents' mysterious deaths in their New Jersey home.
Cooper Health System CEO John Sheridan and his wife Joyce, a retired teacher, were found in their bedroom in their central New Jersey home Sept. 28 after a fire was reported there. John Sheridan, 72, was declared dead there; Joyce Sheridan, 69, died hours later at a hospital.
Authorities have said the fire was set on purpose but have not said what killed the couple. Officials also said that no one else was in danger.
A spokesman for the Sheridan family tells The Philadelphia Inquirer that pathologist Michael Baden has been recruited to help.
Baden worked for O.J. Simpson's defense team in his murder trial and has had his own HBO show on forensics. He was also hired more recently to do a private autopsy on Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old who was fatally shot by a white police officer in August in Ferguson, Missouri, setting off protests and a renewed national conversation on race.
The Somerset County Prosecutor's Office says it is awaiting laboratory results before it can determine what caused the Sheridans' deaths. The Sheridans were remembered by four New Jersey governors at a memorial in Trenton.
Their four sons include Mark Sheridan, one of New Jersey's highest profile Republican election lawyers.
