Days Numbered for Outdated, Cramped Morgue

The only thing moving in the Ventura County morgue was an old oscillating fan.

Just 12 inches wide, the fan shoved air around the cramped room to a small ceiling vent that weakly sucked it up to an outside exhaust.

“That’s our ventilation system,” said Dr. F. Warren Lovell, the county coroner, staring at the tiny basement morgue in the county medical center in Ventura where he and his staff must autopsy up to 500 bodies a year.

Thanks to a $2.5-million bond sale approved last week by the County Board of Supervisors, a new morgue will be built nearby.

Lovell and his staff said they can hardly wait for the day the new morgue opens.

“Gosh,” said Jim Wingate, a veteran coroner investigator due to retire in a few years. “I might just stay a couple years longer than I would have.”

No more will the reek be emitted out the morgue’s rooftop air exhaust and into a nearby fresh-air intake to the hospital’s surgery suite.

Lovell shrugged wistfully and said of the old morgue: “It would probably not meet the critical inspection of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”

It was not always like this.

Ventura mortician Joseph P. Reardon remembers when he was elected to the post of Ventura County coroner in 1937 to succeed his recently deceased father, Oliver L. Reardon.

Bodies requiring autopsy--those who were murdered, or those who died young or mysteriously--were dissected in the embalming rooms of the funeral homes that were to bury them, he said.

“Morticians were giving all this nice service to the county for free,” Reardon said.

Then on April 24, 1974, the County Board of Supervisors changed the business of investigating suspicious deaths.

It changed the system of elected coroners and hired autopsy doctors to a system of an appointed medical examiner with an assistant coroner and a staff of investigators.

The coroner and staff were moved into “temporary” quarters in the small, prefab building with the stamped aluminum sides on Hospital Road, where they remain today.

And autopsies were moved into the morgue at Ventura County Medical Center, where a cramped elevator lowers bodies to the basement morgue from the loading dock outside.

The old morgue’s refrigerator has room for six to a dozen bodies. The new morgue will have space for 30 bodies, and room for another 14 in a special freezer for those that are badly decomposed.

Now, one autopsy room handles heavily decayed bodies and those that died recently. In the future, the new morgue will have separate autopsy rooms.

Sometimes the living--those other than hardened cops or coroners--must see the dead in the county morgue.

“It’s certainly . . . a miserable arrangement for anybody who’s had to go there to view a body,” said Reardon, a mortician for 62 years.

Lovell and Wingate said they try to avoid showing bodies. The only place to do it is in the tight hallway between the refrigerator and the examining room.

“If they really insist,” Wingate said, “we have them sign a waiver releasing us from liability for psychological damage.”

A separate viewing room, with soft lights and sofas will be built at the new morgue, he said.

Construction is scheduled to begin in four months.

“They need a new facility out there,” Reardon said. “No matter what they did, it’d be better than it is now. It’s just plain miserable.”