Coroner’s office changes its procedure

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

milliken@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Beginning Monday, the Mahoning County coroner’s office will no longer send investigators to death scenes.

It will send a body-removal service, and its investigation will begin the next business day, Dr. David M. Kennedy, county coroner, announced Friday.

The change is coupled with an announcement that the coroner’s office will lay off Jesse Hoffman, one of its three investigators, effective April 30, due to the county’s budget crisis. The layoff will save the county about $35,000 a year, Dr. Kennedy said.

Remaining will be Tom Pappas, chief investigator, and investigator Rick Jamrozik.

Dr. Kennedy said he hopes the layoff can be only temporary.

The coroner’s office spent $637,838 from the county’s general fund last year. Its general-fund allocation for this year is only $600,000.

“I just don’t think we can do as good a job not being at the scene” of a death, Dr. Kennedy said, noting that immediate preservation and documentation of evidence at a crime scene is critical to the investigation.

“It’s going to take us longer to get the information, and there’s some information we’ll never be able to get,” he added.

Sometimes, coroner’s investigators can detect subtle clues that a dead person didn’t fall but was a beating victim, he said.

Without its investigators going to death scenes, the coroner’s office won’t be able to contribute crime-scene photos and notes to an investigation and will have to rely entirely on the police probe for information from the scene, he noted.

Dr. Kennedy said he and Dr. Joseph Ohr, forensic pathologist and deputy coroner, can selectively go to death scenes, but they can’t go to all death scenes that are coroner’s cases.

“We’re going to have to do a little more thorough examination of the body at the crime scene,” said Capt. Rod Foley, chief of detectives with the Youngstown Police Department.

Foley said police like to have coroner’s investigators at death scenes because they have considerable experience in such probes and help detectives at scenes by alerting them to circumstances they may not be familiar with.

“The coroner’s investigators will give us a preliminary cause of death, sometimes at the scene,” Foley observed. “It kind of helps the detectives early on on which way to go with the investigation,” he added.

“If there are obvious signs of homicide, we’re going to know that, but sometimes, it’s not always obvious,” Foley explained.