I’ll be honest — when I found out that we had a field trip to the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s office, I was a little uneasy at the idea. My understanding of a medical examiner and what they do stretched about as far as seen actors and actresses play them on Law and Order.
Hillsborough County sees about 10,000 deaths each year, and about 1,700 of those come to the medical examiner’s office. The medical examiner’s office can run for two and a half days on its own power if there is an outage, and can hold up to 200 bodies in its facilities.
The facility was built in order to handle the growth of the county for the next 50 years, as the population will continue to increase over the years. It was interesting to me how intricate the planning and general infrastructure for the building was.
My first impression walking in wasn’t so bad, though. You could hardly tell what the place was from the outside, and even the front lobby didn’t look anything like I imagined. There were flowers and posters hung up in the administrative officers. Friendly staff greeted us, and it just seemed like any other ordinary place.
I learned quite a bit from the experience though. Dick Bailey, the operations manager at the medical examiner’s office, told us that the staff tries to be courteous to the people who visit them, because a lot of the time it’s not under pleasant circumstances.
Bailey explained to us the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner, which was that a coroner is elected and a medical examiner is a licensed doctor. He also told us that the coroner system would one day become obsolete, as cities are able to hire more licensed doctors.
A medical examiner is also the person who will determine the cause of death, and that an autopsy is not always run once a person dies. Basically, the medical examiner’s office will deal with any death that we see in the newspapers or online, Bailey said.
The public records available at the facility includes just about everything they do, Bailey said, unless it is part of an ongoing investigation. What interested me about the public records was that if you receive a death certificate from the medical examiner’s office, it will include more information than it would had it been received from Vital Statistics, such as the cause of death.
Learning that helped me see that sometimes it’s not what you’re asking for that determines what you’re going to get, but where and who you’re asking.
Driven By Daydreams 