County morgue in need of updates

Another viewpoint is a column The News-Herald makes available so all sides of an issue may be aired. Mark K. Komar, MD, FAAFP, is the Lake County coroner.

The purpose of this letter is to bring to the attention the urgent need for a state-ofthe-art morgue in Lake County. This is not a sexy or appealing subject, but dealing with death is an essential community function and the Lake County Coroner’s office provides this service to our citizens in a professional, caring and empathetic fashion. Lack of an adequate morgue is a problem that is not being addressed by our county administration.

The current morgues were part of the Lake County Hospital System for many many years. The morgue was a Lake County facility shared by the Coroner’s Office and Lake County Hospital until the privatization of Lake County Hospital in the late 1980s. With the recent purchase of Lake Hospital by the UH Hospital System we are in potential danger of losing our ability to store decedents and perform autopsies in their facilities.

Lake County, although small, is the 11th most populated county in the state. With an aging population and the ongoing tragic opiate epidemic, the number of decedents our office takes care of every year continues to increase. We currently handle greater than 800 cases per year, 150+ of them requiring an autopsy or an external exam and roughly an additional 80 overdose cases which require toxicology.

Lake County is lucky to have a forensic pathologist on staff so we can do autopsies and external exams at home in our county. This means we don’t have to burden an already overworked Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner with our cases. The work is kept here in Lake County, which means results are reported quicker and there is improved and timely communication between our families, law enforcement and the coroner’s office.

The UH Lake West morgue was built in 1959 and has had some renovations but is still very outdated. It only holds eight decedents. Because of limited space, we are not able to add a walk-in refrigerator or deep freezer to store decomposed bodies. The roller-type crypts that are now in place to store bodies are difficult to use and create a dangerous work environment for the Coroner’s Office employees and anyone who has to access them, notably our funeral home personnel. It is not unusual for the staff to handle a body weighing up to 400-500 pounds. A large walk-in type refrigerator would be advantageous especially for safety reasons. A deep freezer is needed to handle bodies with advanced decomposition or for long-term storage.

The UH TriPoint morgue is much too small to adequately perform autopsies. It only accommodates six decedents. The new Mentor CCF Hospital doesn’t have a morgue for storage, which means that anyone who is deemed to be a coroner case must be transported to UH Lake West or UH TriPoint for storage. Our storage capacity is often taxed. During the COVID epidemic it was often at critical levels. At one point along with the Lake County Emergency Management Agency we considered renting refrigerator trucks for additional storage.

Our current morgues at the hospitals have no ability to store decomposing bodies for any length of time. Quite often, bodies are found that are very decomposed and odorous and require long-term frozen storage if they don’t have family available to make immediate burial arrangements. The cases where immediate family cannot be located become a burden on the city or township in which they live. Storing these people for an extended time has always been a problem for our office. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner has been able to help with this type of frozen storage, but due to the increase in their caseload, frozen storage is not always available in their facility and is available only on a caseby-case basis.

Lake County families rely on our office to transport an unexpected death to the morgue for temporary storage until they reach out to a funeral home or cremation center. We are currently in danger of losing control of the current morgue facilities. If the UH Hospital System decides that we can no longer use their facility for storage or autopsies, we will have nowhere to hold decedents until a funeral home is contacted for transport. We would no longer be able to do any in-county autopsies and would be at the mercy of the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner. They would decide who gets an autopsy or external exam. They would basically control our office and the costs that go along with it.

Geauga and Ashtabula counties have expressed an interest in having their autopsies performed in Lake County as the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner office is overwhelmed and reports can take up to six months to be finalized. There are also a number of Lake County funeral home directors who have expressed their desire to have a Lake County morgue facility.

Finally, Lake County citizens deserve an in-county state-ofthe-art morgue for their loved ones. They deserve a morgue with properly working and maintained equipment, morgue storage for all residents no matter what their condition upon death and they need to know that Lake County cares for its residents and will always treat them with the best care and compassion.

I recognize that this is a distasteful subject but one that needs to be addressed now for the sake of our society and for future generations. I urge the citizens of Lake County to express their concerns about this to John Plecnik, current president of the County Commissioners and ask that the commissioners remedy this tragic and hidden county inadequacy.

With an aging population and the ongoing tragic opiate epidemic, the number of decedents our office takes care of every year continues to increase.