Appointment of New Coroner Gets Final OK
Los Angeles County supervisors Tuesday gave final approval to the appointment of the No. 2 man in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office as the new chief medical examiner.
Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, a native of India, takes over the $150,000-a-year job that has been vacant for more than a year. “Should we just call him Doc?” Supervisor Kenneth Hahn said of Sathyavagiswaran, who is usually called by his first name, pronounced Lock-smon-an. A 15-year veteran of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, Sathyavagiswaran, 43, states in his resume that he has performed more than 2,000 autopsies.
The office was once run by Thomas T. Noguchi, the flamboyant self-styled “coroner to the stars,” who was accused of poor management and lost the job in 1982. Ronald Kornblum resigned as coroner in July, 1990, afer a critical audit.
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