Baden was hired by Carradine's family to conduct an independent autopsy, which is all the rage in Hollywood these days. He told Reuters that while his complete report won't be available for a week, he'd determined that Carradine did not deliberately kill himself:

"The cause of death was asphyxiation, an inability to breathe, now why that happened is still what we're working on," Baden told Reuters.

[snip]

"He didn't die of natural causes, and he didn't die of suicidal causes from the nature of the ligatures around the body, so that leaves some kind of accidental death," he said.

Well, we guess that rules out ninjas, right? Any other ideas?

The media has suggested Carradine could have died from accidental autoerotic asphyxiation. In response to a question on that topic, Baden did not rule out that possibility, but he also did not say autoerotic asphyxiation was the cause.

Baden also confirmed what was obvious to anyone who saw the photo of Carradine's body after he died—his hands were tied above his head. Which raises a question as to how one autoerotically asphyxiates oneself with one's hands bound out of reach of one's nether parts. He told Reuters that he is waiting for Thai authorities to provide him with "pass keys for the hotel where Carradine died, and security video to ensure no one was in the room with him at the time."

But if no one was in the room with him at the time, what the hell was he doing?

[Via ArtsBeat.]

This story is all over the internet tonight, but seriously, hasn't suicide been pretty much ruled out by the release of the death scene photos, not to mention the leaks to the media by investigators indicating that there was some serious kink going on in Carradine's hotel room? Regardless, here's what Baden told the Daily News:

After doing the autopsy, reviewing all the findings and the information we have so far, I had sufficient information to rule out suicide. In order to arrive at a proper manner of death, we have to combine the autopsy findings with evidence from the scene and laboratory findings, which could take a few weeks. The family is getting all that through the State Department, the FBI and the Thai authorities. That would include the entire file, whatever is seen by police, everything at the scene and everything from the crime lab and toxicology tests.

Whatever, we're sticking by our belief that fake death-jerk staging ninjas are behind this, and Baden said nothing today that rules that out.

UPDATE: Cityfile's Remy Stern emailed to inform us that Michael Baden has a bit of a checkered past. He was fired from his position as the city's chief medical examiner by then Mayor Ed Koch for mishandling evidence and for "his inability to work smoothly inside the criminal-justice system." He now appears regularly as a forensic "expert" on Fox News. We don't think that this renders his findings insignificant, but it is sort of interesting.

Famed New York Forensics Expert: David Carradine Death Was Not Suicide [Daily News]