Coroner yields to 24-hour demand

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

milliken@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

The Mahoning County coroner agreed to rescind the layoff of an investigator and make his office available for death investigations at all times.

The action, taken Friday, followed stern lectures from the county prosecutor, the county administrator and the chairman of the county commissioners,

“Hopefully, this meeting won’t be about if we’re going to have 24-hour coverage; it’s going to be how we’re going to have 24-hour coverage,” said Anthony T. Traficanti, chairman of the commissioners.

“I just want to set those expectations for the community,” Traficanti said as he opened the public meeting, which ran for more than an hour Friday morning.

“I think we deserve 24-hour coverage from the coroner’s office,” replied Dr. David M. Kennedy, county coroner.

“You can’t not be available,” county Prosecutor Paul J. Gains told Dr. Kennedy, reading to him a section of state law that says the coroner and his assistants must be available for duty at all times.

Because commissioners approved a 2010 budget of $600,000 for the coroner’s office, which spent $637,838 last year, Dr. Kennedy announced that, as of April 19, he would no longer send coroner’s investigators to death scenes and would send only a body-removal service. The coroner’s office would begin its investigation the next business day, Dr. Kennedy said.

Dr. Kennedy also said he’d be laying off Jesse Hoffman, one of his three investigators, effective Friday because of his budget constraints.

“I wasn’t trying to make a political statement; I was trying to live within my budget,” Dr. Kennedy said.

A firestorm of criticism was directed at Dr. Kennedy when he failed to appear or send an investigator to the scene of last Saturday’s triple-fatal auto accident in Campbell. A car hit a house, and families of the deceased protested that they didn’t get final confirmation of the identities of their loved ones until Monday morning.

“Regardless of the budgetary constraints, something such as this should have been handled,” Gains told Dr. Kennedy.

“There should have been at least some response from somebody to either accommodate these victims’ families or explain to them and not blame it on the budget because the bottom line is: Our jobs are to service the public,” he added.

“Yes, but you have to be funded appropriately to do that, and I did the best I could with the budget I was given,” Dr. Kennedy replied.

Dr. Kennedy said he declined a Saturday morning request from Detective Sgt. John Rusnak of the Campbell Police Department, who investigated the crash, to let the families see the bodies at the morgue over the weekend.

Dr. Kennedy said he declined because he didn’t want families to see post-accident bodies that hadn’t been prepared for viewing and because he wanted to avoid any possibility that the bodies and any evidence with them would be disturbed before autopsy.

However, if Rusnak had wanted to come to the morgue by himself to see the bodies to make confirmed identifications to report to the families, Dr. Kennedy said he would have been admitted over the weekend.

Dr. Kennedy defended his decision not to go to the crash scene by saying the police had identified the deceased at the scene and that his presence wouldn’t have added anything to the police investigation of the crash.

Dr. Joseph Ohr, deputy coroner and forensic pathologist, was unavailable to go to the scene because he was out of town, Dr. Kennedy said.

County Administrator George J. Tablack said he didn’t see why the layoff couldn’t be rescinded because the coroner appears to be operating within his budget with one third of the year elapsed and based on his spending trends over the last five years.

Dr. Kennedy replied that he has been faced with expenses he can’t control, such as the costs associated with X-rays, autopsy supplies and body-removal services, and rising costs of lab tests and medical-waste removal.

Dr. Kennedy said he wanted assurance that, as an elected official, he would not be held personally liable if he overruns his budget.

Gains told him he could only become personally liable if he exceeds 60 percent of his payroll appropriation before June 30.

“Based upon the figures that Mr. Tablack has generated, you will not surpass that 60 percent figure by June 30,” Gains told Dr. Kennedy.

Tablack told Dr. Kennedy that his spending for contracted outside professional services appears to be running $70,000 below his appropriation in that category because Dr. Ohr, who was hired early last year, is doing the autopsies here, and the coroner’s office no longer routinely ships bodies to Cleveland for autopsies.

Tablack also noted that a fluke in the 2009 calendar introduced a 27th payday, but normal years, such as 2010, have only 26 paydays, thereby helping all county departments with their payroll budgets this year.

“It’s unacceptable that he did not go to the scene and that those families had to be put through what they were for that whole weekend,” Juanita Rich, Campbell 4th Ward councilwoman, said after the meeting.

“Hopefully, with today’s meeting, this will be rectified, and it won’t ever happen to any families again,” she said.