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Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

Your Death Will Not Be A Typo

Catherine Cloutier |
October 29, 2009 | 9:17 a.m. PDT

Staff Reporter
coronersign
Craig Harvey, the coroner's office's Chief Investigator, says he actually spends
more time working with the living than with the dead.
(Creative Commons licensed)

The Los Angeles County Coroner's Office's Chief Investigator Craig Harvey attributes his career to a typo.  Looking for a career in law enforcement, Harvey saw an advertisement in the newspaper for a "corner investigator."  He applied, and the rest is history - and a lot of dead bodies.
 
"As soon as I started doing it, I knew it was for me," Harvey told a small group of reporters at the Society of Professional Journalists mixer on October 20. 
 
Neon Tommy's Catherine Cloutier caught up with Harvey at the event and got all the gory details.
 
Neon Tommy: After realizing the typo, why did you decide to remain in this field?
 
Craig Harvey: An interest in forensic science. Also, I enjoy being able to decipher scenes of death and determine what happened in a scene when the only person who knows what happened can't tell you.
 
What was your first experience as a coroner's investigator like?
 
It was kind of surreal, because I had never been around death before. You find that you have to use a lot of skills.  You have to be like a priest, a police officer, a lawyer, a rabbi, a scientist, and, you know, even Sherlock Holmes.
 
You're actually there to help the family more than anything else.  You spend more time with the living than you do actually with the dead.
 
You come away from it with a new respect for life, and you have a great sense of accomplishment because you helped somebody at a very difficult time in his or her life.
 
What is a day in the life of a coroner's investigator?
 
It just really depends.  We cover almost 4,000 square miles of the county.  You can do one, two, three or four cases a day.  They can be natural deaths, or they can involve shootings or custody deaths, drug overdoses, or suicides.  You can be at the beach in the morning and up in the mountains in the evening.  The job is hardly routine.
 
Do you go to the scenes of death?
 
I supervise the investigative unit.  If a person is pronounced dead at the scene of the death, then we'll go to that location and do our death investigation.  Once the body is moved, then the scene is destroyed.
 
But that doesn't mean that we don't go to scenes after the body is moved because sometimes, we need to verify it or collect evidence.  For instance, with someone who jumps off a building, we usually go back to the building to verify that they did in fact jump from the roof or a specific window.
 
How many times do you go out on average day?
 
It depends on our caseload.  Some days, we do not go at all.  Other days, we go three or four times in a shift.  On average, we handle about 50 new cases a day, and we'll bring about 15 to 20 bodies each day into our facility.  That's over a 24-hour period.
 
What is it like working with dead bodies?
 
You get bodies intact and freshly dead, you get them decomposed and dismembered, and you get them skeletonized.  You look at each case as a responsibility and a challenge to recover as much of that body as you can.  That way, the families can have a reasonable assurance that they are burying all of their loved one when they have the funeral services.
 
How has your life been changed by your choice of career?
 
Overall, it has made me less afraid of death.  I think it makes you more aware of the horrible things that people do to each other.  Also it makes you a little more sympathetic to other people's plights in life and a little bit more forgiving to the occasional crazy person you encounter on the street.
 
Do you bring religion into the work?
 
Some people do.  I'm spiritual not religious.  My job has confirmed my beliefs, but I don't denigrate their beliefs.
 
I heard that in New York City during the recession in late 1980s people discarded dead bodies.  Have you noticed this phenomenon during this recession?
 
We have noticed that with the current economy.  People don't have the financial resources to handle the normal funeral arrangements that we've come to expect as customary.  So, we've seen in increase in the number of bodies that have been left for the coroner to make final disposition of instead of the family doing it.
 
What is the most gruesome thing you have ever seen?
 
The weirdest one was a young boy who was dismembered by a family member as part of a custody dispute.  He was taken apart, put into some trashbags and dumped into a dumpster.  We think his murderer was a doctor because of the precise nature of the dismembering.  If it were not for a scavenger, he probably never would have been discovered.
 
How has job changed your impression of Halloween?
 
I think we're more aware of what constitutes zombies and how people do trauma on their bodies or how they do their makeup.  When you see people who make themselves up to look severely injured, we'll say "that really looks good" or "that doesn't even look real."
 
On the other side of the coin, we have families coming into the office, and they don't want to see skeletons, pumpkins and zombies.  At that particular juncture in their life, it's not funny to them.
   
Now, I heard you consult on NCIS.  What do you contribute to the show?
 
I review the scripts each week.  I've actually done consulting for all the forensic shows on TV.  The CSI shows drive me crazy.  The NCIS stuff is more accurate than CSI.
 
And finally, with all of your experiences with the dead, do you believe in ghosts?
 
No, I believe in the human energy that we all possess.  I don't think you can kill energy.  



 

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