Before Criticizing Coroner’s Office, Pay a Visit to the Morgue

Nearly two months after I visited the county morgue, I haven’t forgotten a single sight or smell.

At the time, the coroner was soon expected to come under fire in the O.J. Simpson murder trial for mistakes made during the autopsies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. I thought it was important to see the conditions under which Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran and his colleagues worked on the murders that have held the nation’s attention since the bodies were discovered last June 12.

As it turned out, my visit was premature. Fearing a recitation of coroner’s office bungling would hurt their case in the crucial early stages, prosecutors delayed that aspect until the presentation of more important DNA evidence.

Sathyavagiswaran began testifying Friday morning. After court adjourned at noon, I sat down at my computer, pulled up my notes from April 6 and recalled my tour of the morgue, located near County-USC Medical Center.

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My guide that day was Scott Carrier, the coroner’s press officer. He showed me around the offices. Then we headed to the area where bodies are brought in for autopsies, placed on gurneys and, afterward, released to mortuaries.

We put on plastic shoe covers and masks, and walked down a hallway and into an overwhelming and unmistakable smell of formaldehyde and death, a stale, sweetish, rotting odor. We stopped at a large scale, where the bodies, still on gurneys, are weighed and measured by height. Down the hall, in what is called “the decedent processing room,” the dead are fingerprinted. In other rooms, they are X-rayed, and finally brought into one of two autopsy rooms.

About 7,000 autopsies are performed here every year by 17 physicians who are medical examiners. All told, the coroner’s office investigates about 19,000 deaths a year, many of them violent.

Yet funding has declined from almost $15 million four years ago to $12 million. An additional 20% cut is contemplated in the budget now being considered by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

As a result, the medical examiners each perform 360 autopsies a year, 110 over the number recommended by the National Assn. of Medical Examiners.

I could see the high-pressure conditions when I watched the autopsies. The medical examiners were working at six stations in one room and five in another.

They had been working nonstop since 6:30 or 7 a.m., four hours before, and would continue until 2 p.m. when they would go to their offices to dictate reports on their autopsies.

We walked to a large room filled from floor to ceiling with racks. Each rack contained a corpse wrapped in heavy plastic that was clear enough to see through. The bodies had been autopsied and were awaiting pickup by a mortuary. I could see many were burned, or marked with gunshot and knife wounds.

The scene was overpowering. I asked my guide how the coroner’s office crew felt about working amid all this death.

But I knew the answer. As a reporter, particularly when I covered police, I learned to suppress my emotions while viewing death. My job was to gather information in a hurry and report the story. Usually, only the death of a child would crack the shield.

It was the same way for the coroner’s staff. Carrier, who was a coroner’s investigator before he became press officer, explained that he was unemotional about his work except when he saw dead kids.

Craig R. Harvey, chief of the investigations division, said: “You really have no emotion in terms of sorrow or gladness. I look on each case as a whodunit.”

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It is the whodunit aspect of the coroner’s work that is under fire.

“Often the body is the best piece of evidence at the crime scene,” Harvey said. “Whatever you do to that body will remain--sex, stabbing. . . .”

Unfortunately, there’s a question of how well the coroner’s office analyzed the evidence revealed in the bodies of Goldman and Nicole Simpson.

Mistakes were made at the autopsy table by Deputy Medical Examiner Irwin Golden. Coroner Sathyavagiswaran conceded this in court Friday.

But what may not be determined in court is to what degree high pressure and overwork, caused by inadequate appropriations, had to do with the mistakes.

Golden’s errors are expected to be hot news this week. The commentators will trash him and the coroner’s office on television and in print. His awkward manner may even expose him to “Saturday Night Live” satire.

And just wait till Letterman and Leno get hold of Sathyavagiswaran’s name and Indian accent.

But before the ridicule begins, let the critics visit the morgue, stand for a while in a hallway heavy with the smell of formaldehyde and rotting flesh, and watch the doctors bent over corpses for hours at a time, under constant pressure of more bodies and less money each year.

No wonder they make mistakes. I’m surprised there aren’t more.