Death and Kindness

A 91-year-old San Gabriel man had slipped into his pool and drowned. He lay on a gurney in his yard, a county worker a few feet away waiting to wheel him to a van. Los Angeles County Coroner Investigator Joyce Kato gently unwrapped his face for his daughter.

“Daddy . . . I’m so sorry . . . I didn’t want you to go this way,” the daughter sobbed as she stroked his cheek.

During her two years on the job, Kato, 31, has learned how to examine heads blown open by bullets, trained herself not to flinch at the stench of bodies decomposed beyond recognition, and taken up a weightlifting regimen to better equip her petite 5-foot frame to lift corpses.

But confronting those left behind never gets any easier. Though she has learned to subdue her emotions in most cases, she has cried alongside grieving family members. You never forget that the most routine case is someone’s personal tragedy, she says.

As a coroner’s investigator, Kato is part detective, part grief counselor and part body pickup worker. Most of all, her job is about bringing closure when life ends.

She is one of 27 investigators who are called to the scene of a death to identify the body, collect its personal effects and make observations to help determine the cause of death. Sometimes, investigators notify the next of kin. They do not perform autopsies, which are the domain of pathologists.

Ask Kato why she does the job, and she will tell you that caring for the dead is caring for the living. When she examines the bloody, bullet-ridden body of a young gang member, she knows there are loved ones who cannot understand why. When she must resort to labeling a body as John Doe because it is so decomposed or burned, she knows there may be somebody who agonizes over the uncertainty.

“If you ask a really good coroner’s investigator, ‘Why do you do it?’ they’ll say ‘for the families.’ I feel the same way myself. I try my hardest for the families.”

The Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner, one of the busiest in the nation, handles 19,000 cases a year. The investigator’s role often falls into the public eye in high-profile homicide cases. But homicides make up less than 10% of the coroner caseload. Those who die unremarkably and in obscurity--unexplained natural deaths, accidents and suicides--constitute the majority of a investigator’s work.

Balancing professionalism with humanity can be as subtle as a certain inflection in her voice or as demonstrative as an embrace. “I’ve hugged people before,” Kato said. “You just know that’s what they want to do.”

Kato’s capacity for caring was apparent from the start, said Craig Harvey, chief of operations for coroner’s office. “She has the type of compassion to be sensitive when things are really raw for the family.”

But emotional sensitivity can lead to harrowing moments for investigators. Kato remembers a suicide, one of her first cases. The teenage son of an immigrant Vietnamese family had hung himself. She needed the older brother to translate the suicide note, written in Vietnamese, for her. The parents sat in the living room as the brother read the letter out loud in Vietnamese and then in English.

The parents began to weep, and then the brother broke down and could not finish. Kato says she couldn’t help crying.

Capt. Dean Gilmour of the coroner’s investigative division said every investigator has a tearful moment at some time or another, even if it is quietly alone at the end of a workday.

Still, Kato said, the experience with the suicide “has changed the way I handle myself out on the field. I try to be as professional and polite as possible without getting emotional. I let them know they can give me a call if they need something, and then I try to go.”

Suppressing emotions does take a toll, however. Since starting her job, Kato has gone from smoking a pack a week to a pack every two days--a habit she said is “a way of handling the stress.”

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Another coping mechanism among coroners is a macabre sense of humor. A colorful vocabulary often accompanies shop talk in the office. A body found in a damp place is a “moldy oldie.” A decomposed body is a “stinker.” Toys of skeletons, vultures and rats decorate some of the investigators’ desks, though Kato chose more conventional family photos to hang above hers.

Kato said she understands why an outsider would be horrified by this irreverent humor, or upset by seeing coroners laughing among themselves at a death scene. “I hope the public understands it’s a necessary part of how we function,” she said. “Otherwise it would be too pathetic.”

It’s not always easy to come home and talk about her workday with friends and family. Although Kato’s boyfriend of 10 years, Frank Tomota, an automotive service advisor, is “very proud and very supportive” of what she does, he doesn’t like to hear the specifics, she said. He’s getting better, she added, but she doesn’t expect him to take a tour of the office any time soon.

Kato’s mom also is adjusting--slowly. “She keeps telling me to find a new job.”

But Kato intends to stay for a while--a few years, at least. Harvey said he spotted Kato as a rare individual who had “a fire in her belly for this kind of work” when she applied for the job. While she was training, she came in before her shift to watch autopsies, though that was not required.

She had never seen a body outside of a funeral before she took the job. Still, aside from a slight rush of anxiety the first time she was taken to the morgue and saw a lineup of bodies on steel gurneys, she adjusted to the idea immediately.

“I think of a dead body as a part of nature. I see a body at all stages, from just-dead to decomposed, and I know it is just a thing,” she says. “The soul is gone.”

Kato, a second-generation Japanese American and Los Angeles native, attributes her religious beliefs and an appreciation for unconventional careers to her father, a Free Methodist clergyman. He wanted her to attend West Point and join the military or be a police officer.

A graduate of Cal State Los Angeles in criminal justice, Kato applied to the Los Angeles Police Department after graduating. While waiting for an interview, she volunteered for the County Probation Office, where she heard about openings in the coroner’s investigative division. Kato was fascinated from the start.

An applicant’s “disposition and trainability” are the primary qualifications for the investigator job, Gilmour said. New investigators receive two weeks of training and then work under training officers as apprentices for several months before going into the field on their own.

Today, Kato’s father is thrilled about her career choice; he shares her views of death as a passage into a better place.

“When I see [the body of] a little abused child and all of the marks on its body, I always think to myself, the child is in a better place. It’s not suffering anymore,” she said.

Still, the job can test even the toughest candidates. Gilmour remembers a former police officer who had worked homicides being sent to the body of an infant on his first day as a coroner’s investigator. He quit that same day.

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Recently, at the scene of a homicide investigation, Kato dragged a decomposed body out a shallow grave. Attending police officers would not stand downwind. Unfazed, Kato rolled up the sleeves of her red cardigan sweater, pulled latex gloves over manicured fingernails and began palpitating gaping gashes in the man’s head to assess the wounds.

The sight was unremarkable for Kato, who has picked up chunks of brain matter strewn across a sidewalk, hiked deep into the San Gabriel mountains to pick up a decapitated head and a severed pair of feet, as well as inserted gloved fingers into countless bullet wounds.

“I’m not squeamish,” she said. “I mean, obvious things scare me--like a mouse or a haunted house.”

Still, all the toughness in the world can’t always get a young, 5-foot woman past police lines when officers just can’t fathom that she is from the coroner’s office. When she was starting out, Kato nearly got shut out of some crime scenes even though she always wears a badge and name tag.

In a society whose enduring prototype of a coroner is the grizzled “Quincy, M.E.,” Kato has gotten used to the surprised reactions. They aren’t entirely unwarranted, since she is one of only four coroner’s investigators in the county younger than 35. Men outnumber women nearly 3 to 1.

Lt. Mike Nichol, of the LAPD’s Rampart Detectives Division, said he was among those who were initially fooled. “I imagine like everyone else who stereotypes folks, you think, ‘No, that’s not the coroner,’ ” he says. “But then you watch her and she is truly professional in her approach. The goriest murder is just another day’s work. She’s won the respect of detectives.”

When her 10-hour-a-day, four-day workweek is done, Kato unwinds by playing basketball on an Asian American league, hanging out with her two dogs in her Glendale apartment, and visiting with her parents and siblings.

Glancing fondly at a snapshot of her nieces and nephews, who are all younger than 6, Kato said that when the time comes, she will be more than happy to discuss with them what she does for a living--though they haven’t asked yet.

And just how would she explain the work of a coroner’s investigator--the grisly murder scenes, the ever-steady stream of bodies flowing into the morgue, the grief-stricken families--to a kindergartner?

Kato paused thoughtfully for a moment, smiling to herself. “I would tell them, ‘After someone dies, somebody has to take care of them and all of their things. And that’s what my co-workers and I do.’ ”