Well.... The nursing staff told me that the patient had died in front of them, yet the jaw _was_ stiff. The patient was also in asystole. My guess as to what happened was that the patient died sometime before being discovered, and the nurses - not understanding rigor mortis would then start CPR. Or the jaw may have undergone a weird muscular spasm peri-death, as there wasn't a huge amount of gravitational pooling. Either way - I happen to think that the nurses didn't tell us the whole story and were trying to cover their backs. I've also left some details out of the post for confidentiality reasons.