Three years after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told Clayton County it would no longer act as its coroner, the south metro Atlanta community still doesn’t have a permanent medical examiner.
Since February 2021, Clayton — one of five Georgia counties without a constitutional office of coroner — has contracted Caswell Truman LLC to handle its medical examiner services. The appointment was supposed to be temporary while Clayton studied options for a fixed position.
But the enduring coronavirus pandemic, which began three months after the GBI announced it was severing ties with the county in January 2020, and a nationwide shortage of medical examiners has hampered finding a permanent leader for the job, Clayton officials say.
“There were a number of hoops we would have had to jump through to make that happen,” Clayton Commission Chairman Jeff Turner said. “Then with COVID being on the forefront, that just took a back seat.”
The clock is ticking. The market for medical examiners and forensic pathologists is expected to tighten, experts said, as more and more jurisdictions fight to fill positions.
Ashley Garrish, an assistant deputy director with the GBI, for instance, told Channel 2 Action News that the need is so pressing that the agency recently got approval to fill positions with international medical examiners by being an H-1B visa sponsoring employer.
And Clayton itself has earmarked about $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for a medical examiner’s office that must be spent by 2026, or the funding will be returned to the federal government.
The county has identified a more than 40-acre lot it owns in Rex to be the site of the office. But Turner told the board in December that he didn’t think $5 million would be enough to build the facility. Currently the medical examiner’s office is being run out of the Clayton County Police Department headquarters.
Without a medical examiner to be the face of the office, that duty has fallen to Clayton County Police Chief Kevin Roberts.
Roberts, who leads the task force on establishing the medical examiner’s office, pushed the county last year to add an additional mobile morgue after the one Clayton has been using ran out of space.
He also urged the board last November to update an ordinance to allow cremation of unclaimed bodies after 15 days to conserve space. He told the commission that even with the second mobile morgue, the county may need more room.
“We can’t predict the amount of deceased persons that may accumulate,” he said at the meeting.
Turner praised Caswell Truman for stepping in and helping Clayton manage its medical examiner operations. But he said in the long run he hopes Clayton can have a county-run medical examine office.
“They are doing a tremendous job,” he said. “They came in at a time when we needed them most.”
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