Job Pressures Prompted Kornblum’s Resignation

“He was just tired,” one associate said of Los Angeles County Coroner Ronald N. Kornblum.

Tired of the day-to-day stress. Tired of allegations of mismanagement. Tired of the bureaucracy.

After eight years in a pressure cooker of a job, the 56-year-old pathologist suddenly announced on Thursday he was resigning, effective July 1, to return to “what I do best, namely medicine.”

Kornblum said he finally decided to leave the administrative post while testifying this week in a 1981 murder case in which he performed the autopsy.

“I looked at the autopsy record that I hadn’t looked at since 1981,” he said. “I felt this is what I should be doing. It got to me that I have been away from this too long.”

Those close to Kornblum said no one event triggered his resignation as the boss of the country’s second largest coroner’s office. Instead, they said, it was a combination of internal and external events, including:

Not enough space to store bodies, which led to hygiene problems.

“There were just too many bodies and not enough spaces,” said the coroner’s veteran spokesman, Bob Dambacher, although new administrative procedures in recent months cut the inventory to 160 bodies, from a high of approximately 400, stored daily in three refrigerated basement rooms.

An independent management audit that called for 155 changes in the coroner’s operations after finding that staff shortages, coupled with a growing homicide rate, were leading to a breakdown in controls and unsanitary conditions.

What Kornblum saw as “a smear campaign” by a handful of former employees whom he himself had asked to search for inefficiency and possible wrongdoing. Some of this group, all of whom have since left or were fired, have made allegations of wrongdoing to county prosecutors, but no charges have ever been filed against Kornblum.

Since last fall, an independent Los Angeles television station, KCOP, has broadcast a series of reports alleging mismanagement and wrongdoing in the coroner’s office. “He obviously didn’t know what was going on,” said the station’s news manager, Steve Fentress.

Although an associate said Kornblum professed to never have viewed the series, his administrators did. Most of them thought “it was a witch’s hunt,” but the series generated more internal tension, said the associate, who asked not to be identified.

Kornblum, formerly the coroner for Ventura County, took over the Los Angeles office in 1982 after the flamboyant Thomas Noguchi lost his job amid charges of mismanagement.

Kornblum made no secret of the fact that he was a pathologist first--for which associates around the country gave him high marks--and an administrator only because he was forced to be one.

As chief medical examiner-coroner, Kornblum directed a staff of 160 people who, in 1989, investigated 18,000 suspicious or violent deaths. More than 5,000 of those required autopsies by the office’s 18 physicians.

“The doctors are under tremendous pressure to get the cases expedited as soon as possible,” spokesman Dambacher said.

In resigning his $120,925-a-year post, Kornblum said he plans to teach forensic pathology, write a textbook on the subject and serve as a private consultant.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich said he will ask the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to conduct a nationwide search for a successor.

“We may have to think of reorganizing the office,” Supervisor Ed Edelman said. “Kornblum was a great pathologist, but not a great administrator. The job may be too much for one person.”

In order for someone other than a pathologist to be put in charge of the coroner’s office, voters apparently would have to repeal a 1956 amendment to the County Charter, which specified that the coroner must be a physician.

Supervisors Edelman and Kenneth Hahn said they and other supervisors should better monitor the coroner’s office.

“One of the problems we have around the county,” Edelman said, “is that by having all the departments under the whole board, we don’t know what is going on here.”

Until recently, each supervisor was assigned by the board chairman to oversee the operations of particular departments, including the coroner’s office.

Kornblum, whose low-key, introverted style contrasted sharply with that of his predecessor, Noguchi, was not as aggressive as other department heads in competing for scarce county dollars to beef up his department, according to Hahn. “He didn’t want to make any bold statements or pound his fists or call the press and say, ‘look at all these dead bodies stacked up.’ ”

Nevertheless, supervisors increased the coroner’s budget last year by nearly 15%, to $10.8 million.

New York City’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, said in a telephone interview that if Kornblum resigned because of the pressure, it wouldn’t surprise him.

About 40,000 deaths are reported to Hirsch’s office annually and “each has a potential to be a front page scandal if it’s mishandled,” said Hirsch, 53, whose two predecessors both were fired for alleged mismanagement.

“I don’t know of any coroner who claims to be infallible,” he said. “It’s one thing for government officials to make mistakes that cost money. But here you’re dealing with someone’s life.”