Arkansas Gazette
Sunday, November 9, 1986
For the county coroner’s office DEATH could be just around the corner
Should the death certificate be signed on the coroner’s office in Arkansas?
Three years ago, former Pulaski County Coroner Steve Nawojczyk told the Arkansas Coroners Association that because they lacked training, the “majority” of coroners are laughingstocks to the majority of law enforcement agencies.”
An elective position, the coroner’s office requires no qualifications for those who seek the office other than they are registered voters and free of felony convictions. The majority are funeral home directors, which is convenient and has a certain logic to it.
But it is the coroner’s job to determine the cause of death when it is not obviously due to natural causes, which requires some knowledge of medical terminology and investigative procedures.
Ideally, under the dual system of the elected county coroners and the appointed medical examiner working out of the state Crime Laboratory in Little Rock, the coroner should be the investigative arm of the medical examiner’s office, Nawojczyk, now the chief deputy coroner of Pulaski County, said in a recent interview. Who is in a better position to do a back ground investigation and interview local people than a local person?
“In order for that system to work well, all the cogs have got be well-oiled and the rub is training,” Nawojczyk said.
This creates potential for conflict between the coroners and police, who are increasingly better-trained in homicide investigations, and prosecutors who have come to rely on the forensic expertise of the medical examiner.
“Law enforcement personnel think we get in the way,” Nawojczyk told his colleagues three years ago. And more recently, of prosecutors he said, “Most of them will tell you they don’t even mess with him (the local coroner.) They don’t get his reports. They wouldn’t subpoena him on a bet.”
Sherryl Dahlstrom of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock found from interviews with police agencies and hospital personnel in preparing a study of the coroner’s office for Washington County that “the office is only an extra layer of bureaucracy at a time when the extra layer is not needed, and in fact, a person in the office could actually impede a criminal investigation simply through ignorance.”
Ron Fields, prosecuting attorney for Sebastian and Crawford counties, has issued a memo to police chiefs and sheriffs in his district that essentially encourages them to circumvent the coroner:
“(T)he coroner’s office is not to be considered as a law enforcement agency charged with the responsibility of investigating suspected homicide scenes. The coroner’s office is not responsible for compiling or gathering evidence nor should they be asked to render opinions as to the cause of death. That function by state statute is reserved solely for the state Medical Examiner’s Office, with assistance by the law enforcement agencies who have been called to the scene.”
Fields went on in the memo to leave to his office the decision as to when to request an autopsy.
He went on to say that he regretted having to take such steps, but said erroneous press statements as to manner and cause of death, wrong decisions on when to release bodies for burial without autopsies, and delays in handling evidence in criminal cases made it necessary.
Fields pointed out in a telephone interview that when the office was created by the 1874 Arkansas Constitution, doctors usually held the post. But the office has been downgraded and the pay now is so low that it no longer interests members of the medical profession. State statute sets a maximum and minimum salary for six classes of counties, based on population. Annual salaries range from a high of $25,392 in Pulaski County to $100. Five counties pay nothing. Most range from around $2,500 to $1,000.
“Since then, we’ve got well-intentioned people, but most are not capable of handling the medical investigation,” Fields said.
And the Crime Laboratory now provides the forensic expertise needed for homicide investigations.
Fields agrees that the system needs to be evaluated and said he would like to see the office upgraded.
In the meantime, he gives the coroners in his district a courtesy call in criminal cases, but asks them to remain in the background until the police have had a chance to deal with the body and the crime scene.
“In fairness to them, they have just not been trained for that position,” he said.
Sebastian County Coroner Jack Sloan said he has not had a problem with Fields’ office, although he knew that the prosecutor’s memo was partly directed at him.
“What I do is go out and make the determination it was a homicide and try to get the time of death and cause of death,” Sloan said.
Sloan also defended his right to release information to the press.
And he defended his own qualifications, since he works in the funeral home industry.
“Who can be more qualified (among local lay people) than an embalmer?” he asked.
“You’re not going to get doctors that will serve,” he noted.
Sloan also pointed out that the salary for his office is $5,200 per year and that the second-largest city in the state, Fort Smith, is in his county. The Quorum Court allows no money for a deputy, furnishes no vehicle or phone. Sloan gets 20 cents a mile for travel expenses, but pays for his own phone pager.
Sloan agrees that training is needed for coroners. He recommends making it a law to send coroners to a two-week course in forensic pathology.
“That’s the only way you’re going to solve the problem with the coroner’s office in Arkansas,” he said.
Bob Burns of Bentonville, president of the state Coroners Association, noted that a 12 ½-hour course covering areas from terminology and anatomy to investigative skills and press relations has been put together for the benefit of association members. He said attempts are also being made to set up a one- to two-day course at the medical examiner’s office every two years after elections. Also, about 140 coroners have been certified to draw blood from bodies. If the coroners know what’s expected of them in the field, Burns said, it will make for better coordination and communication among local authorities.
“In Benton County, I would say we have the best cooperation between the coroner’s office, the prosecutor’s office and investigators,” he said.
Burns thinks Fields is out of line. “He had a problem and he tried to direct around it,” Burns said.
“I’m trying to get sufficient training when we can stop the nitpicking,” he said.
Most conflicts, he said, were isolated incidents according to the specific personalities and political circumstances of the particular counties.
“If you’ve got people of good will, it shouldn’t be a problem,” he said.
In Washington County, the Quorum Court looked into the possibility of either shifting the coroner’s duties among other offices, making it an appointed position or eliminating it by exercising the reorganization powers of quorum courts.
Mrs. Dahlstrom in her study recommended the office should be made a full-time, appointed position. An advisory committee would be formed to define the coroner’s role in the law enforcement system and keep overlapping services to a minimum, determine minimum qualifications, and review procedures.
The Quorum Court abandoned any reorganization, apparently in the face of knotty problems over just how the legal responsibilities of the coroner’s office could be shifted to an appointee.
The current coroner, Col. William G. Myers, a Republican, claims the move was motivated by a Democratic Quorum Court.
But Peg Anderson, a Fayetteville justice of the peace, said the problems went back at least 10 years with Democratic coroners who preceded Myers.
Myers, a retired military lawyer, also admits he has generated some controversy over his novel approaches to determinations he makes on deaths in what normally are ruled as motor vehicle accidents.
Myers has ruled some traffic fatalities as “homicides.” He ruled the cause of death of a driver in one such incident in which alcohol was involved as “homicide, self.”
Such determinations on death certificates have caused problems for the state Health Department’s bureau of vital statistics. An official from the bureau has tried to persuade Myers to change his determinations and to conform to the accepted designations of “homicide,” “suicide,” “accident,” “cannot be determined,” and “pending investigation.”
Myers refused.
“It’s no accident at all when somebody’s driving 90 to 95 miles an hour with his lights off, trying to out run a police officer,” Myers said.
“Everything there is under their control. It is not an external thing like a deer running in front of the car, or a rock rolling off a hill,” Myers said.
The rules will not allow calling such an incident what it is, “death by misadventure” as the British call it, Myers said. He defends his determination, because, legally, he believes these are cases of negligent homicide.
Myers admits he is fighting an uphill battle, but he believes his point should be made.
“I think of myself as in that other lane,” he explained, “doing everything proper, thinking of everyone’s safety. I don’t have a DWI policy. I have a crossing the center line policy. It just happens most of them are DWI.”
And what about the criticism that he is causing additional and unnecessary grief for families?
“They want me to be a funeral director,” Myers complains of his critics. “Their concept is, the coroner has to go out of his way to keep from hurting the family. You don’t go out of the way to hurt them, but it’s not the coroner’s place to worry about upsetting the family. When an investigator arrests a murderer, he upsets the family.”
Mrs. Dahlstrom’s study also indicated that before long the “practice of transporting bodies to the Little Rock facility” would need re-evaluation, that “the laboratory’s facilities will soon reach the saturation point…”
The matter of autopsies is already a sticky issue with the medical examiner’s office. Legislators have begun to grumble about the number of autopsies requested by coroners and law enforcement officials. Some legislators have said some autopsies are unnecessary.
In an attempt to cut back legislators are looking at legislation that would limit autopsy requests to coroners and their deputies, prosecuting attorneys and the Department of Correction. Currently, chiefs of police and circuit courts can also request autopsies.
Burns and the Coroners Association supports the move. Nawojczyk opposes it. The Crime Laboratory needs to be beefed up and more autopsies, not fewer, performed, he claims.
Probably 250 out of the 1,000 deaths in Pulaski County last year were violent. He understands that there is not enough money in the medical examiner’s office to do all 1,000, or the 20,000 in the state, about 10 percent of which are unnatural deaths.
So that means some 2,000 deaths could be autopsied, and the Crime Laboratory does about 500 statewide, some of those reluctantly, Nawojczyk said.
Jim Clark, director of the state Crime Laboratory, and Dr. Fahmy Malak, chief medical examiner, are well aware of Nawojczyk’s position but point to their budget.
“To do autopsies is good, but it takes money,” Malak said.
Clark points out that between 500 and 600 autopsies per year are performed, about two per working day. Clark points out that the law says the medical examiner’s office must be notified of any suspicious death, not that it must perform an autopsy.
So autopsies are usually limited to criminal cases. An attorney general’s opinion interprets the law to say that autopsies should be performed only when expert testimony is necessary.
But Nawojczyk likes to say, “Everything we do is for the benefit of the living,” and points out that an autopsy can perform a valuable service in investigating non-criminal cases.
“There are many things that can be learned from an autopsy. There’s more to the coroner’s office than knowing the cause of death to send somebody to jail,” Nawojczyk said.
Sometimes, too, appearances can be deceiving. In the case of Deborah McGuire, a young North Little Rock woman, a variety of drugs in McGuire’s purse at the scene made it look like a drug overdose. Nawojczyk decided not to ask for an autopsy initially. He did take blood samples, and sent them to the Crime Laboratory. When they came back negative for drugs, Malak was shown pictures of the body and agreed to do an autopsy, and cyanide was found in tissue samples.
Malak said that when he looked at the photos, he suspected either cyanide or carbon monoxide poisoning from the reddish hue of the body.
“That case should have come to the lab,” Clark said. “Yet when a person steps off a curb and is hit and dragged 87 feet with six witnesses, they want to send the body to the Crime Lab because they want to prove negligent homicide.”
Clark said he doesn’t have any problem with what Nawojczyk is trying to do, but until the governor and the Legislature want more autopsies done, they will have to stick to the criteria that suspicion of criminal foul play is involved in the death.
In her study, Mrs. Dahlstrom noted that satellite labs, or regional offices of the medical examiner’s office, have been proposed as a solution to taking some of the burden off the central office. Actually, when the medical examiner’s office was first established, in 1977 and 1978, assistant medical examiners were assigned around the state.
There were 10, Malak said. They were apparently local pathologists, and they did autopsies locally. There were problems, however, in that they didn’t notify Little Rock about autopsies or apparently forward the results to the medical examiner. They also apparently were independent as far as their budget was concerned, and it was hard to get information on what was spent. The assistants were done away with in 1979.
Malak agrees that if some control and uniformity were imposed, he would like to see regional offices staffed by forensic pathologists.
But Nawojczyk maintains there are too many cases that don’t get done that should be. There is the traffic accident where there is not that much damage to the body. Can they find the person had a heart attack before the wreck? Not without an autopsy. The family needs to know what happened. The insurance company needs to know if it is required to pay double indemnity or not.
“It’s a time bomb ticking,” Nawojczyk said. There is no telling how many deaths, he says, that are misaccounted for. There may even be some homicides that are slipping by undetected. Of course, this happens anyway, but it could be improved, he said.
Nawojczyk proposes no easy answers.
“There is no simple solution to a complex reality, and what we’re living is a complex reality. It’s getting worse,” he said.
Nawojczyk would like to see the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Crime appoint a committee to look at the coroner and medical examiner system from top to bottom.
Some of the laws are archaic. For example, the coroner is required to quell riots, assaults and batteries, and to arrest the sheriff, which Nawojczyk was called upon to do during one of former Sheriff Tommy Robinson’s squabbles.
Burns disagrees on this point. If somebody has to arrest the sheriff, which he also had to do it might as well be the coroner, he said.
Something more crucial is noted by Mrs. Dahlstrom.
“The present law enforcement structure in Arkansas provides for a medical examiner with clearly defined responsibilities and excellent physical facilities,” she wrote. “The fact that it must function along with an elected coroner system is paradoxical, to say the least. The consultants’ brief contact with these parallel systems suggests an urgent need for careful but drastic revision.”
Nawojczyk brings the objective closer to home.
“I don’t want them to think of me as the hodge-podge coroner that’s been there for years who goes in and kicks the body. I want the guy in Stone County to be as respected by the police as we are here.”
