NORWICH — Jennifer Ramsaran’s death was ruled a homicide, testified Onondaga Chief Medical Examiner Robert Stoppacher Tuesday at the Chenango County Courthouse.

Stoppacher testified that he received Jennifer’s body on Feb. 27, 2013, the day after Chenango County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Kelly Hayner said her father located what he thought was a dead body on his land in Pharsalia.

Stoppacher recalled the condition of the body and shared it with the jury. Since the victim’s body was found in the winter, he said her body was in a frozen state, and there was a short time before he was able to perform a full autopsy.

Stoppacher testified as both the medical examiner who performed the autopsy and an expert in the field. The reasoning for conducting an autopsy is to declare a cause of death and a manner of death, he said, adding that there are three components to an autopsy.

First is the external examination where injuries are noted, clothing, and where he would look for natural diseases. Second is the internal exam, where surgical procedures are performed to examine the condition of the brain, heart, lungs, liver, and other organs. Finally is the lab component that consists of x-rays, microscopic tests, blood samples, and toxicology tests.

“All three components are how we arrive at a determination,” Stoppacher said.

He said the most striking thing he noticed about the victim in this case was that he could tell she had been deceased for “some period of time.”

Due to decomposition of the body, and what Stoppacher referred to as “animal activity,” he was ultimately unable to determine a cause of death. He described the difference between cause of death and manner of death. A cause of death for a person could be a heart attack, and for that person the manner would be declared natural causes as he said a heart attack results from natural activities of bodies.

Stoppacher said in the case of this victim, there was no abnormal tissue; she didn’t have a stroke, pneumonia, hypothermia.

In the victim’s case, he did note “relatively small” bruises in a few locations on her body and a laceration of approximately one-half to three-quarters of an inch on the top left thumb knuckle. He said there was another tear behind her toe that was close to two inches in size. He said each injury could have been there prior to her death.

With regard to his internal examination, Stoppacher said there was decomposition to some of her organs, and he noted an area of bleeding on the left side of her scalp, near the top of her skull, approximately an inch in size.

“There were no fractures or breaks,” Stoppacher said. “On her back there were two narrow bands of bleeding, from left to right.”

He added there was nothing evident of that on her skin.

Stoppacher testified that those injuries happened prior to the victim’s death, because after death, “You don’t get bleeding as localized as that,” he said. “Although if the body does bump something after death, it could happen.”

According to Stoppacher, there was “no lethal injury in and of itself.”

Stoppacher said there are ways of death that don’t leave marks outside of a body, including suffocation or smothering. He added sometimes a medical examiner could see evidence of that, but in this victim’s case, he could not prove nor disprove that. He said another possibility was strangulation, but there were no bones injured on the victim, which is common with strangulation.

“Based on the state of the body are you able to tell anyone the cause of death?” asked Chenango County District Attorney Joseph McBride.