Sheriff Coroner

In California the coroner's office is usually referred to as the "Sheriff Coroner" because the county sheriff has the duty of retrieving the deceased, in many cases. The Sheriff is an elected official, so his/her job is performed as a public trust.

The Sheriff coroner's technicians, clerks, and other functionaries keep the gears rolling when death arrives outside of a hospital.

It is the technicians that actually do the lifting-moving of the deceased. These are the personnel tasked with entering a death scene littered with thousands of dead flies and even more thriving flies, often airborne. Maggots, spiders, and other insects thrive in this environment, for a while. Once the technicians do their work, the insect life begins to die off. At times, the deceased has become stuck to the carpet. It is easier to contain, lift, and move the deceased and carpet as one piece of material, at times.

I am usually very pleased with the technicians' work. "How do they do it," I often think when I walk into an advanced, decomposition scene. I may be wearing protective gear, at least a full-face respirator. They have been in and out wearing paper masks, if wearing anything on their faces at all! Sure they probably get used to the odors, if anyone can get over these odors -- I never have. Sure they probably get used to the horrific scene of bloated or mummified human remains -- I never would. My hat is off to them. And fairly consistently they do good work, sometimes beyond the call of duty, it appears.

Rarely do these technicians fail to gather all the bio-waste from a violent death scene. Wounds to the head create special problems, at times. With a head wound, I expect to find hair, pieces of scalp, pieces of teeth, and even pieces of jaw. These pieces are obviously missed because they were projected well beyond the immediate proximity of the deceased. After all, why should the technicians be looking in a closed shower when the suicide took place on a bed some 25 feet away?

Wounds to the abdomen by large caliber handguns may cause the stomach and other vital organs to spill onto the surface of the floor, right next to the deceased. It depends upon the the angle of the projectile; it depends upon the victim's clothing or lack of clothing. Unlike the discrete pieces created by a head wound, the abdomen's contents sort of slide into a bloody mix. Either stomach, spleen, kidney, and liver, some part or whole of this mix pour onto the floor's surface, in many cases.

The technicians remove most of this mix, but for the blood and unknown ooze. On occasion, though, small or even large quantities of this mix sort of slide under a bed or under a night stand beyond sight, beyond reach. After all, this mix is quite fluid, slippery, and moving with some velocity following impact. As physics would have it, this mix is so slippery that it becomes difficult to pick up. For recent wounds, say within 36 hours, removing this slivering mix requires pushing it across the surface of the floor into a dust pan or such. It is too slippery, too amorphous to simply remove as one would a discrete piece of carpet.

This is where I come in, to recover what the coroner's employee's might have missed or simply ignored. After all, sometimes there are heating blanket wires, lamp wires, clock wires, TV wires, radio wires, computer and monitor wires, shoes, socks, pillows, blankets, pictures, bottles, ash trays, and more covering the line-of-sight to the errant, abdominal mix. Perhaps the released material has slid away on a nicely polished stone or linoleum surface. You get the picture?

The coroner's technicians earn their keep, then. Keep in mind that they lift death many times. Sometimes death is heavy; Sometimes death is not so heavy, and sometimes death is stuck to the floor and surrounding walls and ceiling. These technicians earn their stripes the old fashioned way, lifting and moving under fire, so to speak.

I suspect that many coroner's employees make very nice friends. I suspect that they have a defensive attitude about their occupation, "Someone has to do it."

I can find no wrong with the job or the job description.
With all they do, with so little public recognition and all the wealth to be gained in the world, I can easily imagine how a coroner's technician might bend to a bit of bribery from a guy like me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.