Budget Cuts Add to Grim Reality of Coroner’s Office : Finances: County workers worry about delays, lawsuits as they struggle to investigate 18,000 deaths a year.

Jane Doe No. 52, a 2-week-old baby, has been abandoned in a parking lot and coroner investigator Robert Fierro is about to examine the body. A detective leans against a balustrade, smoking a cigarette, and the uniformed officers chat among themselves. This seems like a routine case. After all, the bodies of five other babies have been abandoned in the past four months.

But when Fierro peels back three layers of plastic bags and a ragged blanket wrapped around the baby, everybody freezes and stares in stunned silence. Somebody has bound the baby’s mouth and nose with masking tape.

“Son of a bitch,” the detective mutters. “They taped her mouth shut to keep her from crying.”

Of the 72 people who died last weekend in Los Angeles County, 22 of them homicide victims, Baby Doe--as she was called--was the youngest, the smallest and her case was the most poignant for investigators.

Those who work at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office confront the grim consequences of a violent city on a daily basis. Attendants pick up the bodies. Investigators probe the bullet wounds and notify the stunned relatives. Pathologists dissect the corpses. In the midst of all this carnage, coroner employees try to remain detached from the unrelenting anguish.

But now they must contend with a different kind of stress. The coroner’s office, faced with a $1.4-million budget cut, laid off 22 employees Wednesday. Over time, that will have a severe impact on the investigative and forensic function of the department, coroner’s officials said.

They anticipate delays in the removal of bodies at accident and crime scenes and longer waits for the identification of corpses and notification of next of kin. It has not been determined how long the delays will be, but coroner investigators expect more complaints and even lawsuits from angry family members.

“After all these layoffs,” said coroner investigator Cheryl Goodman, “I sure hope I don’t die in Los Angeles County.”

Despite the cutbacks, the coroner’s office must continue to investigate, transport and examine an endless procession of corpses. About one in four deaths in the county are coroner cases--more than 18,000 a year--and they include accidents, suicides, any death of a suspicious nature and, of course, homicides.

The 22 people killed last weekend--about average for Los Angeles County--died under myriad circumstances. Victims were shot sitting in cars, driving in cars and approaching cars. Victims were run over by cars and bound, gagged and tossed from cars.

Victims were shot while making telephone calls, withdrawing money from automatic teller machines and leaving dance clubs. Four people were shot to death while committing crimes--one was holding up an Eastside liquor store, another was burglarizing a Canoga Park home and two were attempting to deal cocaine from their Hawaiian Gardens apartment.

Four victims were stabbed to death and one was beaten to death. Eighteen were men, three were women and one, who had been wrapped in plastic for months, was so decomposed investigators could not determine the sex.

In addition to the homicides, investigators handled another 50 cases--people who died in auto accidents, drownings, at home and at work. Two people committed suicide--an 86-year-old man jumped off the 31st floor of his West Hollywood apartment building and a 30-year-old Rolling Hills man shot himself in the head.

*

Murder is a surprisingly subdued affair in the coroner’s operations center, a large room with powder-blue carpeting and polished oak furniture. The call of death comes in the form of the soft ring of a telephone at the reporting desk. A clerk takes the call, informs the watch commander sitting behind a large desk, and he assigns investigators and attendants to the case.

In the basement, one floor below, pathologists conduct autopsies on the steady stream of corpses. In the subbasement, research criminalists scan hair and fabric fibers with an electronic microscope. On the second floor, lab technicians prepare tissue samples and slides. During busy stretches--such as weekends, when the homicide toll nears the record of 45--coroner officials fear that bodies could remain out on the street, in public view, for up to eight hours.

The sight of decomposing bodies would not only offend residents’ sensibilities, it could compromise criminal investigations, said Craig Harvey, chief of the coroner’s operations bureau. Physical evidence--such as clothing, hair fibers and body fluids needed to solve many crimes--is perishable and could be lost if the body is not examined and promptly stored in refrigerated crypts.

“This is going to cause a lot of anxiety for families,” Harvey said. “Families who are waiting for the identification of a relative, waiting for the body to be released for the funeral.”

Last weekend, after coroner investigators finished examining bodies, attendants wheeled the corpses on gurneys to their vans. But Baby Doe was so tiny that attendant Ruben Pena just picked her up, cradled her in one arm and carried her from where she was abandoned--next to a trash can at Los Angeles International Airport--to his van.

As Pena returned to the coroner’s office early Sunday, heading east on the freeway toward the sunrise, the horizon slowly turned from black, to gray, to deep blue with pink streaks. He changed lanes and sighed heavily.

“These are the only cases that really bother me. I got two kids myself and they’re so helpless when they’re babies . . . “ he said, pausing in mid-sentence and shaking his head.

When he returned to the morgue, he opened the back of his van, where the baby was wrapped in her blanket and strapped on the gurney, a white speck on a six-foot sheet of brown steel. He carried Baby Doe inside, weighed and measured her, and recorded her dimensions in the log--11 pounds, 19 inches. Her ankle was so tiny, about the size of Pena’s thumb, he could barely tie on the processing tag.

Another attendant carried Baby Doe to the refrigerated homicide crypt and carefully set her on a small metal shelf against the wall in a rack designed for infants. The autopsy is scheduled for Monday morning.

*

The first homicide that coroner investigator Craig Harvey rolls to on Friday night is a shooting in Baldwin Park. It is the 8,119th body the coroner’s office has handled this year. A 35-year-old man has been shot numerous times in the chest after approaching a car that slowed down in his neighborhood. He is lying on his back in the middle of a side street, which is flanked by single-family homes and well tended yards. It is a warm summer night and the scent of jasmine is carried in the breeze.

Harvey arrives at the scene and checks in with the detective, whose job is to comb the crime scene and find the killers. But he cannot touch the body--that is Harvey’s domain. The coroner’s job is to test victims for gunshot residue, determine the time and manner of death--in this case, which of the bullets killed the man--and to preserve the body until it can be released to a mortuary.

Harvey examines the entry and exit wounds and studies the path of one bullet embedded in the man’s back, the slug neatly outlined just below the skin. He cuts a small incision just above the man’s belt and inserts a thermometer deep into the liver to estimate the time of death.

When he finishes examining the body, Harvey heads to the home of the victim’s parents, who have learned of the shooting from friends. The tiny living room, with photographs of children and grandchildren and a large picture of Jesus, is filled with relatives. Two young cousins are crying in the corner. The mother tries to keep her composure and answer Harvey’s questions so he can complete his report.

An aunt tells Harvey that the shooting was not gang-related and that her nephew was not in a gang. But the man’s tattoos tell another story. He had the tattoos of a veterano , with gang insignia on his chest, his neck, and his arms and hands. Even his right eyelid was tattooed with his gang name.

The family of another youth shot by gang members over the weekend also insist that their son was not in a gang. After examining his body, coroner investigator Cheryl Goodman is convinced the family is right.

The 15-year-old is in the homicide crypt, a cavernous vault kept at 40 degrees. The crypt fills up with gurneys over the course of the weekend until there is such a logjam that investigators can barely get from one end to another. Goodman points to the boy’s arms, neck and hands. There is not a single tattoo. And he is not “dressed down” in gang clothing; he is wearing a blue, long-sleeved shirt, a cowboy belt and cream-colored boots from Mexico.

The boy and his uncle were returning from a dance when a group of gang members in Wilmington, who were standing around drinking beer, began taking potshots at people driving by, detectives said. The boy was hit once in the back of the head.

Goodman calls the father, who had been notified of the killing by police, to fill him in on coroner procedures. The father talks about what a good boy his son was and how he does not understand all the violence in Los Angeles. Goodman sympathizes with him, comforts him when he cries and explains that it will be about two days before his son’s body can be released.

“Please,” the father tells Goodman. “As soon as possible. . . . I just want to see my son.”

*

The coroner’s office, the second busiest in the nation, has a controversial history. Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, the self-styled “coroner to the stars” who headed the office for 15 years, was demoted in the early 1980s for poor management after audits revealed numerous problems in the department. His successor, Dr. Ronald Kornblum, resigned in 1990 after another audit found the department deficient in more than 150 ways.

Now employees are struggling with a different type of turmoil--cutbacks. They are concerned about how they will be able to do their jobs with staff reductions that include six mortuary attendants, three forensic technicians, and a number of clerical workers and part-time employees. These layoffs follow 28 positions eliminated last year during budget cutbacks, out of a total staff of about 200.

Last Saturday night, the final one before the cutbacks, started slowly and attendants lounged around the office waiting. Waiting for someone to die. In a county where the coroner handles more than 2,000 homicides a year, they usually do not wait long.

Before the first call of the night, staffers recounted some of their more dramatic calls. Investigator Thomas Ratcliffe recalled the case involving the elderly couple in Ladera Heights who were baby-sitting their grandchildren when two men planning to burglarize the house pulled up in front in a stolen car.

One man--who was 6 feet, 6 inches and weighed about 275 pounds--kicked in the back door to the kitchen while his partner waited in the car. The intruder pulled out a pistol and lunged toward the grandmother. But the woman, barely 5 feet tall, beat him to the draw. She whipped out a .38-caliber snub nose and shot him three times in the chest before he could fire a round.

When Ratcliffe arrived at the scene, the woman was sitting at her kitchen table sipping iced tea, perfectly calm and composed.

In the San Fernando Valley, a woman reported that her husband had died in his work shed. Paramedics examined the body and pronounced the man dead, Craig Harvey recalled. When the investigator arrived, he noticed a note on a workbench, leaned over to grab it and placed a hand on the corpse’s back for balance.

The corpse suddenly gasped for air.

The man had stopped breathing for several minutes because a plug of chewing tobacco was stuck in his throat. With the help of the investigator, he spit out the tobacco and was revived.

The storytelling comes to an end when the inevitable series of homicide cases begin stacking up. A 40-year-old man was robbed and shot while making a telephone call on the Westside. Forty-seven minutes later, a Canoga Park man returns home from a party and shoots a burglar he finds ransacking his bedroom.

Throughout the night and into the next day, coroner attendants continue to clean up the carnage from weekend violence, until a few minutes before midnight, an 18-year-old man is stabbed in the neck while walking down Main Street in South-Central Los Angeles.

This is the 22nd homicide since Friday--the final murder of a typical weekend in Los Angeles.