Event to modify the HTTP status being sent

I'm trying to get my extension to report 410 on a removed topic. I have some spam on the forum (human spam) and when I remove their posts/threads, they have already been sent to search engines via sitemap. Then Google and Bing crawl those 404's for years to come.

I would like to send 410 in such cases. Google and Bing still come to 410 links but less often. It's also considered a good practice to send a 410 in case a link used to exist but will not come again anymore.

In includes/functions.php we have a code:

if ($msg_text == 'ERROR_NO_ATTACHMENT' || $msg_text == 'NO_FORUM' || $msg_text == 'NO_TOPIC' || $msg_text == 'NO_USER')

{   send_status_line(404, 'Not Found'); }

It would be good to have an event around that piece of code, so an extension could choose to send 410 instead.