Coroner’s Office Begins Long, Grim Task of Identifying Remains : Pathology: Medical examiners say dental records will probably be needed.

A weary Dr. J. L. Cogan, Los Angeles County’s acting medical examiner, surveyed a command center Saturday afternoon in the basement of his agency’s headquarters and concluded he was satisfied that “everything was going smoothly” in the wake of the airliner disaster at Los Angeles International Airport.

“The staff handled itself in a very professional manner,” Cogan said.

Five badly burned bodies--three males and two females--found near the wreckage of the USAir jetliner and the SkyWest commuter plane were transported to the medical examiner’s office near downtown Los Angeles between 2:30 and 3 a.m. Saturday.

“The bodies were recovered on the Tarmac and in the debris,” said the medical examiner’s spokesman, Bob Dambacher. There was no way of estimating the victims’ approximate ages, he said.

Five doctors performed autopsies on the bodies Saturday, Cogan said, adding that, given their condition, it was likely that positive identification would have to be made through dental records. Other identification methods--such as fingerprinting--would be impossible because the bodies were so badly charred.

A sixth body, Dambacher said, had been “hanging” out of the jetliner and was being delivered Saturday afternoon for an autopsy.

Cogan said he first heard about the disaster at about 6:30 p.m. Friday as he was on a ramp to the Golden State Freeway driving home.

“I was praying it was somewhere else,” said Cogan, 45, a veteran of about a dozen years in the coroner’s office.

In a few seconds, however, he said he learned that the disaster had taken place at LAX. He got off the freeway at the next ramp and swung back to the medical examiner’s offices in the County-USC Medical Center complex.

In retrospect, Cogan said, “we were fortunate we had a light day Friday” in terms of the number of autopsies the medical examiner’s 10 permanent doctors had to perform.

The Los Angeles medical examiner’s office is one of the busiest in the nation, second only to New York. In 1989, the last year for which figures are available, the office investigated about 18,000 deaths.

Dambacher said that several bodies remained in the wreckage of the two planes as late as Saturday afternoon because conditions were still too dangerous at the crash site. He said this was a reference to leaking fuel lines and other hazards.

As the autopsies were being performed, Dambacher said “we have to seek out dentists” to help identify the victims.

William Eckert, a nationally recognized forensics expert from Wichita, Kan., who has worked on some of world’s biggest airline disasters, said that, typically, the airline “makes contact with the family and the family then makes contact with (the victim’s) dentist. The dentist then sends a chart and any radiological material (X-rays)” back to the coroner.

In cases where the body is fragmented, Eckert said in a telephone interview, genetic blood tests have successfully identified victims.

Otherwise, he said, “we would look for some unusual characteristic like orthopedic surgery” performed at some point in the victim’s life.