The Coroner and the Cost of Death : Cutbacks: Four regional offices may close. Long delays in dealing with fatalities may occur.

The worst financial crisis ever to confront Los Angeles County may end up affecting not only the living, but also the dead.

Consider the case of Sunday school teacher Bernadine Day, who perished Monday when her car was rear-ended by a drunk driver, knocking it into the path of oncoming traffic.

Twenty minutes after the head-on collision was reported, an investigator from the county coroner’s office quickly extricated Day’s body from her black Toyota, removing her corpse from public sight and enabling sheriff’s deputies to reopen the clogged Santa Clarita roadway and return to patrol.

But Day’s body would have remained in the 94-degree heat for up to six hours while crowds gathered and traffic continued to back up if budget cuts now being considered by the county Board of Supervisors had been in effect.

“We’d all be out here for hours just waiting,” said Deputy Alan Young of the county Sheriff’s Department. “And there would be no one on traffic patrol in Santa Clarita.”

The proposed budget calls for saving $715,000 by closing the coroner’s headquarters in downtown Los Angeles daily between 2 and 6 a.m., and completely shutting down four regional offices in Lancaster, Sylmar, Los Angeles International Airport and San Dimas. (The San Dimas facility, which is the newest, opened last Sunday in the local sheriff’s station to handle cases in the east county.)

Complaints about corpses being left for long periods at accident and crime scenes while investigators drove out from downtown Los Angeles prompted the coroner to open the first regional office in Lancaster five years ago.

“Our response time had been very, very poor--up to six hours--because it’s such a humongous area to cover,” said coroner’s spokesman Tony Hernandez, noting the immensity of Los Angeles County, which covers 4,069 square miles, an area about the size of Lebanon. “With the cutbacks, we’ll go back to those delays and more.”

The regional offices handled about 18% of the coroner’s 18,300 cases last year, Hernandez said.

If they are closed, the delays would not only tie up traffic, keep police officers off the street and hasten decomposition of corpses, but would mean that families would not learn of a loved one’s death for longer periods of time, according to a July 2 letter to Sheriff Sherman Block by Director Ilona Lewis of the coroner’s office. After gathering the dead person’s possessions, photographing the body and making a preliminary assessment of the cause of death, investigators are responsible for paying a personal visit to the family to inform them of the death.

The regional offices also make it more convenient for families to reclaim property belonging to the deceased, officials said.

“If I had to drive all the way downtown, I would, but I wouldn’t want to,” said Della Nadler, a Woodland Hills resident who drove to the coroner’s office at Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar this week to pick up jewelry and other possessions that belonged to her 41-year-old son, who died of a cocaine overdose. “It’s painful enough as it is.”

Officials with the coroner’s office hope to persuade the Board of Supervisors that keeping the offices open is a matter of public safety. Under the terms of the state budget, $134 million in sales tax revenue for the county is earmarked for public safety programs--and officials are making a bid for some of that money.

But the supervisors must weigh the importance of keeping the offices at a time when other cuts are being contemplated, including laying off 108 prosecutors.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich opposes the cutbacks to the coroner’s office, but the other supervisors are being more cautious.

“We need to look at the totality,” said Joel Bellman, a spokesman for Board Chairman Ed Edelman, whose district includes the San Fernando and Santa Clarita area served by the Sylmar office. “A huge amount of what we do impacts public safety--lifeguards, restaurant inspection. The question is what public safety purpose is higher than another.”