‘It was very, very weird’: A civil suit reveals new details in the case of Ellen Greenberg, whose death by 20 stab wounds was ruled suicide

Ellen Greenberg’s death was ruled a homicide, then changed to suicide. Her parents are fighting to have the manner of her death changed back to homicide or undetermined.

Philadelphia Inquirer. March 24, 2022
Article by Stephanie Farr

A nor’easter was blanketing Philadelphia with snow when Samuel Goldberg’s call came in to the city’s 911 center at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 26, 2011.

“Help! I need an ambulance now. I just walked into my apartment. My fiancée is on the floor with blood everywhere,” he said.

Goldberg, then a 28-year-old TV producer, had left his fiancée, first-grade teacher Ellen Greenberg, 27, in the Manayunk apartment they shared to go to the gym in their building around 4:45 p.m. When he returned about half an hour later, he found the swing bar lock to their apartment was engaged from the inside.

Unable to gain entry, Goldberg tried to reach Ellen through phone calls and text messages. When she didn’t respond, he asked the apartment building doorman on duty that night, Phil Hanton, to help him break the lock. Hanton said he told Goldberg it was against company policy.

So Goldberg forced the door open himself. Inside, he found Ellen on the kitchen floor and called 911. During the call, Goldberg is initially unable to tell the operator where Ellen is bleeding from, until the operator says she’ll walk him through doing CPR, if he’s willing.

“I have to, right?” he asks.

The operator then instructs Goldberg to lay Ellen on her back and take off her shirt. Goldberg, who noted that Ellen was already on her back, struggled.

“Her shirt won’t come off. It’s a zipper. Oh my God! She stabbed herself,” Goldberg says of the 10-inch serrated kitchen knife lodged 4 inches into Ellen’s chest. “She fell on a knife. I don’t know. Her knife is sticking out. There’s a knife sticking out of her heart.”

“Oh, she stabbed herself?” the operator asks.

“I guess so, I don’t know, or she fell on it. I don’t know,” Goldberg says.

The operator then tells him not to perform CPR and wait for police to arrive.

The 911 call from Goldberg, who declined to comment, was released for the first time last year as part of discovery in the ongoing civil suit Ellen’s parents, Joshua and Sandra Greenberg of Harrisburg, have filed against the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office and the pathologist who conducted their daughter’s autopsy, Marlon Osbourne.

After discovering a total of 20 stab wounds to her body, Osbourne initially ruled Ellen’s death a homicide. But weeks later, he changed her manner of death to suicide, with no explanation to Ellen’s parents, who learned about the reversal from media reports.

The 911 call paints a clearer picture about what the first chaotic moments were like after Ellen’s body was found. But it also revealed an inconsistency with police’s long-held stance that Ellen was never moved from the slumped position on the floor in which she was found when they arrived, with her head, neck, and shoulders propped against corner cabinets — not, as Goldberg said on the call, lying on her back on the floor.

“I think the consensus initially was that it was very, very weird.”

It’s not the only inconsistency that has emerged during the Greenberg family’s 11-year battle to gain insight into their daughter’s death and the investigations that followed.

Unable to get answers from the city, the Greenbergs purchased their daughter’s autopsy report and photos from the scene. They have amassed a cadre of experts, from forensic pathologists to a blood-splatter specialist, who have questioned the suicide ruling, as first detailed in a March 2019 Inquirer report.

The Greenbergs and their attorney, Joseph Podraza Jr., filed their lawsuit against the city in October 2019, seeking to have the manner of Ellen’s death changed back to homicide or undetermined, a move that would allow for an investigation to be reopened and pave the way for a possible wrongful-death or misconduct lawsuit against the city.

“We’re asking to change the manner of death and open a new investigation with impartial people and an impartial prosecutor,” Joshua Greenberg said. “We’re not asking for the moon, just justice for our daughter.”

Click here to read the full article.