County morgue meeting the need
New facility protects evidence, investigators; gives coroner place to meet with families
The coroner may be the last person anyone wants to see. His or her arrival marks a difficult time. And without a comforting space to meet, the experience might be even more dismaying.
Howard County Coroner Steven Seele had this in mind when the push to establish a new office and morgue began a few years ago. Today, the county is much better equipped to handle these times of tragedy. From a single desk in the sheriff’s department to a 10’x15’ room in the hospital, the coroner’s office historically had a problem with space. Since 1961, the coroner had few options when it came to performing their work.
This is no longer the case.
“If you had a homicide, before it was over you had 10-15 people all trying to work out of a tiny room,” said Seele. “You were on someone else’s turf, and when it came to removing a decedent, it had to be done outside right at the same entrance for the heart patients and the oncology department. How inappropriate was that? This is much more dignified.
“My original drive was to have the morgue and the coroner’s office by the jail on Berkley Road. That’s where all the 24/7 operations are. Plus, people have different beliefs about death. You can’t come in the back door without passing the morgue. Investigators and coroner don’t think much about that, but it affects some people. But ultimately, the public is being served very well by the new facility.”
The coroner’s office and county morgue are now located in downtown as part of the Jeff Stout County Government Center; a building named for the beloved former county coroner and funeral director. Operating there for a little more than a year, Seele explained that the new facility is well-equipped to handle the sensitive work of his department while providing a better environment for those difficult conversations with families.
He is most relieved to have a dedicated conference room for family consultations, which is equipped with video options to facilitate remote meetings.
“I can take a photo of the decedent and show it to the family for identification on screen,” said Seele. “When families have been through a bad tragedy that has to involve law enforcement, we can bring in the family with the police department to explain things to them so they can understand what we are doing.
“And we can bring everyone together regardless of their location. During COVID, I had an elderly lady who had lost her husband and wasn’t capable of making decisions on her own. We were able to make a remote connection for her son, who wasn’t able to make the trip to Kokomo but needed to be involved. We really never had this before. We could go down to the police department, but this is just more appropriate.”
Seele said that converting the office’s records to digital format saved an enormous amount of space, time, and money. The coroner is required by law to maintain records for 100 years. That once meant multiple rows of filing cabinets with thick binders full of paperwork. Now, the physical files are thin, with most of the documents existing digitally.
And the coroner is on the same computer records system as local law enforcement so that physical transfer of information is no longer necessary. As a further step, Seele put his department on Evidence.com, which allows him to upload records easily and make them available to the courts for a relevant window of time to ease the adjudication of a case.
“We can attach the detectives to the case and allow the prosecutor access,” said Seele. “If we have evidence that needs to be shared, we can link all of the relevant parties to the material. Defense attorneys also can be given access during discovery. They can log in, and they can have access to the relevant evidence for a limited time. And the system creates a log of everyone who accessed the records.”
Interfacing with the public and the courts is just one of several advances the new facility provides. The coroner’s office now has a fully equipped room for processing evidence for a death investigation, along with secured storage for property and evidence.
“A big thing is handling of evidence,” said Seele. “For instance, if you look at the OJ Simpson case and how that case was lost, a lot of it had to do with how evidence was handled. Here, when we leave in the evening, the coroners are the only ones with access to the evidence handling room. The morgue and the property room are completely secure, and the handling room is accessible only to the sheriff’s department in case of an alarm.
“We find stuff on people all the time. Illicit drugs. Money. Phones. Personal belongings. A person’s prescribed medication. All of it has to be inventoried, and that is done in this area. We document it, store, it, and eventually transfer the evidence over to the police department. Only the chief deputy and I have access to the storage room. That way, the prosecutor only has one or two people he has to call to the stand. We have a very tight chain of custody.”
That same level of security is present in the morgue itself. It is accessible only to the coroner and law enforcement investigators, and it is packed with technology to make autopsies and investigations smooth, secure, and safe.
There are cameras and monitors so that investigators can call up crime scene photos during the autopsy, which comes in handy when the pathologist is trying to establish entry angles for a bullet wound, for example. And the air handling system was designed to limit investigators’ exposure to potential biohazards.
“For years, when you were performing an autopsy, the ventilation was located above the examination table,” said Seele. “So, it would pull the air up, including anything coming from the body, right past your face. Our new system has ventilation in the wall and pulls the air past you. It’s just a little bit of new technology we couldn’t get somewhere else. A morgue is not a profit center, so a hospital was never going to invest in something like that for us.”
Construction took place during the pandemic, but by the time federal funding was made available for projects, the coroner’s office upgrade didn’t qualify since the project had already started. Yet, the county found a way to utilize some of that funding. The morgue’s air handling system had not yet been purchased or installed. The county was able to upgrade that system with federal COVID funds to include negative pressure. It also was able to purchase and install the cooler with those funds.
“I did away with the drawer system in the cooler,” said Seele. “I went to racks, so now we can store 12-15 bodies in there, and we have a second exam table in there. Hopefully, we’ll never need that many. But, say we had a mass casualty situation. I could contact another county using the rack system and borrow three more racks to put in there.”
“I’m really proud of what Howard County has here. It is something that has worked out better than I thought. And we have other counties coming here to see what we have because they are modelling their own morgues.”