 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator and co-host of this program with Chairman Bill Gehring. And today we're very pleased to have a guest, our county coroner, Mr. Dave Lafine. Dave, it's good to have you with us today. It's good to be with you. As you know, monthly we focus on a number of departments throughout Sheboygan County. And in the four, five years that we've been doing this program, I don't think we've had the county. I know we haven't had the county coroner here before. And frankly, I've been looking forward to this program because every time I meet with Dave annually over the budget process, it's just always so interesting. So I think you're going to find this interesting as well. Dave, why don't you start by sharing with our viewers a little bit about yourself and when you first became county coroner. All right. Well, I'm born and raised and educated here in Sheboygan. Tended local schools, tended North High. Married, my wife, Bonnie. I have two adult children, Stacy and her husband, Jamie, and two-year-old grandson, Alexander, and a brand new baby just born last week, named Madeline, and a son and his wife, Liera, who are on the Virginia area. They're teachers out there. Very nice. And well, back in early part of 1986, I was approached by some individuals in the medical community and asked me if I'd be interested in running for coroner. And quite frankly, I had never thought of it. But in my background as a registered nurse, well, it's certainly something I would be capable of doing. So I gave it some thought and ran unopposed in the fall term of fall of 1986. And I took off this first Monday in January of 1987. And I guess as you say, the rest is history. I've been here ever since. And at that time, as you said, someone approached you. It wasn't something you were necessarily having a burning desire to do. But obviously, to do a position such as County Coroner, you have to have some qualifications, as you mentioned. But there's got to be an interest. I'm wondering what motivated you. I was asked and I thought about it, as I said. And I felt it was one way that I could give something back to the community. We have a wonderful, wonderful county here, a wonderful city. Some people find different ways that they can volunteer and give back. And although this is not a volunteer type thing, it is certainly a way to serve. Sure. Sure. You mentioned you felt comfortable applying because of your register nurse degree background. What qualifications do you think one needs to be to operate as a County Coroner? What do I think one's qualifications would be, or what? Sure, both. Well, to be County Coroner, you do not have to have any qualifications. I certainly have a different opinion that there should be some criteria. But to become a County Coroner, anybody can run for the office. What you need to do is take out nomination papers. And nomination papers are based on the county population, which is right around 112,000, which means for nomination papers, you have to have a minimum of 500 signatures and no more than 1,000. And 500 signatures doesn't seem like a lot. But when you're out there hitting the pavement, talking to friends, family, and such it, 500 gets to be a little bit. I personally feel as someone who runs for this type of office should have some medical background. In the past history of the Coroner's Office, we've had physicians. We've had EMTs. We've had pharmacists. I've had myself who's a registered nurse. They've all, to the best of my knowledge, have had some type of background. There are statutes prohibiting certain individuals, like a funeral director cannot be the Coroner. And the reason there is it would be a conflict of interest. Sure. But once you get your nomination papers, you present them. The county clerk's office checks them over, and your name gets on the spring ballot. And if there's more than one person at two separate parties, it goes to the general election. And after that, you're it. And it's rather remarkable. I mean, if you think of some of the other elected positions, we have the county clerk, the register of deeds, the clerk of courts, largely administrative positions. And obviously, based on your background, whether it's accounting or something like that, I would think that would help you. Clearly, your field, having some background in the medical profession, is going to certainly help. And let's get into a few more of, let's give our viewers a sense of what it is the county coroner does. Folks who are watching this might think, oh, that's obvious, isn't it? But I don't know if it is so obvious. Well, county coroner, the job is dictated by or directed by state statutes, specifically state statute 9.7.9. And what that says briefly is that any death following an accident, injury, homicide, suicide, poisoning, there are certain things that say the coroner has to be involved. And when a death of an individual in a hospital said he may or may not involve the coroner, a death in a nursing home may or may not involve a coroner, it would if that person had a fractured hip and that person had fallen. And even though they may not have died from the fracture, it still plays a part where that determination has to be made. I guess maybe better to clarify in that a physician can only sign natural deaths, where the coroner can sign accidental deaths, homicides, suicides, or can determine that a death is undetermined as to the manner of the death. And those are the things that you look at. It's not only the pronouncing. I guess you can have the doctor can pronounce and you can go to the emergency room and somebody comes in from a car accident. And the emergency room physician pronounced that death, but because there was an accident involved, the coroner has to go in there. Thus, a determination is made that they die from a heart attack, that they die from an injury sustained in the accident. So again, only the coroner can make that determination of anything other than natural. And with a population of 112,000 people, obviously you're going to be on call 24-7. You have an office. Give folks a sense of how many coworkers you have, how you handle the responsibilities. Well, we don't per se have an office down at the courthouse. My mailing address would be the administrative building. But as an office, it's basically out of my residence. As you said, Adam, we have 24 hours in a day and one person isn't going to take 24 hours a day, generally seven days a week. So I have deputies that cover. And by statutes, it says I can have up to six deputies. I happen to have four, which works out well. My deputies take the hours of 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. And then I take from 3 p.m. to 7 a.m. And then I take weekends and holidays. And if I happen to have a vacation planned or need to get out of town or go visit my grandson or something to that nature, one of my deputies will cover for me. And you don't run for public office to become a wealthy man from a financial standpoint? There's some compensation, but not a great deal when it comes to the compensation. You know, when most people think of an elected official, they think of a salary. Well, we don't have a salary in Sheboygan County. We have what's called the per diem system. And the per diem means for every death investigation there is, you get a certain amount. And currently, it is 64, 50. When I started 20 years ago, it was $25. So things have progressed over the course of time. But that 64, 50 covers the whole case. If the death investigation takes two hours, takes four hours, takes 12 hours, or if you're putting in three days or four days because of the lengthy investigation, you get 64, 50. That also compensates you indirectly for being on call. You know, someone has to be available. So when you get compensated for the death investigation, you're getting compensated for the call, right? So if you happen to have two calls in a day, okay, you made $120 some dollars, you don't have anything, you don't get anything. But clearly an important public service. And one that there is another alternative. And before I turn it over to Chairman Gehring, for example, some counties, especially the larger counties, they can have a medical examiner. Let's see if you could just touch on that quickly. The way Wisconsin is set up, it's either set up as the coroner system, as we know it here in Sheboygan, or a medical examiner system. The way the state statutes read, any county greater than 500,000 population has to have a medical examiner system. And a medical examiner system is an appointed system. Where counties less than that can have the option of either having the medical examiner or coroner system. Washington County just went to the medical examiner system. Several, right now out of the 72 counties we probably have, I would venture to guess probably about 18 or better than our medical examiner systems. And from what you said earlier, I think as long as we have a good thing going with a qualified person such as yourself, there's no reason to change it. At some point the county board might wanna consider it just to make sure you get a qualified person in there. Right, that would be a thought. At some point in time, if I don't run and nobody else runs, the governor would then have to appoint and at that point maybe the county board would wanna look at maybe going to a medical examiner system and going that route. Very good, thank you, Dave. Okay, Dave, most people probably aren't too excited about having to think about dealing with the coroner, but everyone has to admit that death is part of life. So maybe we could talk a little bit more about what you and your staff actually do in your job. Now I think you've already touched upon the five manners of death, but could you mention them just again? Sure, sure. The most common, you have five manners of death. You have natural, you have accidental, you have suicide, homicide, and one that most people probably aren't aware of is called undetermined. Natural death probably affects out of a hundred deaths. Probably the natural probably is 95%. Homicide, pretty self-explanatory in the fact that someone's took someone else's life. Fortunately in Sheboygan, we don't have too many of those also. Suicides, we do have a fair amount of suicides. In fact, we're sitting at 13 suicides for this time of the year already, and 13 is a lot. And last but not least is the undetermined, and you get that when, after everything's been exhausted, and when I say everything, testing, autopsy, things like that, you cannot come up with a reason for that death. It's undetermined. You don't know if it was a natural death, or you don't know if someone may have taken that individual's life. And by saying undetermined, you're leaving that open for legal ramifications possibly down the road. You just don't know. You cannot say that it was a natural death. You can't say it was accidental. You can't say it was homicide. You just don't know. And you maybe have less than a half a percent of those a year. In the average year, how many deaths does your office investigate? We generally see probably one out of every three deaths in the county, and we've had, I believe, just over 500 last year. As the population of the county has increased, the age of our county has increased, so have the numbers of deaths that we're seeing. And then which type of deaths do you investigate, and how do you go about the investigation? We investigate the deaths that are set aside by the state statutes. So when we're called to a residential death, someone has found at home deceased, we take a look at the individual's medical history. A, we pronounce death. At the time that we get there, and we have determined that there's absence of life, that is what's called the pronounced time. So that's the official time that goes on the death certificate. We take a look at the individual's medical history. We take a look at the individual's medication. We take a look at the surroundings. Sometimes we have the police are involved. We work very closely with the law enforcement agencies on a lot of our deaths to make sure that they do their investigation. We do our investigation. We compare notes and come to this. As long as we're coming to the same conclusion, Dave, what do you see here? And I would go through our findings and they concur or sometimes I may say, I'm concerned about this. Let's do another test list. Let's maybe do an autopsy. And when everything is said and done, we come up with a response and an answer for any determination to the cause and manner of death. The autopsy has kind of been glorified by television in recent years. In what circumstances would an autopsy be done? Autopsies are done in suspicious deaths. Autopsies are done when you may have a young individual where you have no medical history. Sometimes I have requests from the law enforcement that they want an autopsy just to cover all the bases. Children, generally, if there's no medical history, we will do an autopsy. We probably do somewhere around 12 autopsies a year. Probably less than a lot of counties were very, when we order an autopsy, because there was a cost involved there to the county. We want to make sure that we have a good reason to do it, that there is no evidence that's out there that says here your cause of death is, why do you want to do that? If we're going to do it, we're going to have a good reason to do it. We're not going to spend taxpayers' money needlessly. Okay, who does the autopsy? Do you do that or is it contracted out? And then I'm assuming the county does pick up the cost if the county does pick up the cost? No, I do not do them. In order to do the autopsy, it has to be a pathologist. I contract that out with a Dr. Mark Wittek. His name is, he's from Waukesha. He's a freelance forensic pathologist. And I say freelance in that he does it for our county. He does it for Door County. There's about five counties, four counties I think in Wisconsin that he does it for. And he also does Northern Illinois counties. And then you're right, the cost is picked up by the county. We used to have the good fortune of having two very fine pathologists, one at each hospital that would do autopsies for us. But they've since retired and the administration there, the pathologists at the local hospitals don't want to be involved in that, which puts us at a little disadvantage because we have to rely on Dr. Wittek and his schedule. But things get done. Many people might not realize that Shabuigan County does have a morgue. Could you tell us a little bit about the morgue where it's located? Sure, we have a county morgue. It's located in the basement of the courthouse back by the annex down there. Going past it, you wouldn't realize it's the morgue. I'm sure there's been many employees that walked in that back door for years and years without realizing it was. We have the capability of holding three bodies. We have a refrigeration unit that holds two and then we have what's called, which is unique and most places don't have this. It's a glass viewing box, which is a refrigeration unit. And we have an autopsy table there that when one of the local hospitals no longer did their autopsies, we were able to procure that from the hospital, Shabuigan Memorial at no charge, which was a very nice gift, say, of the county and extreme amount of money there. So we have instruments down there to do an autopsy at any given time. We also use the morgue for identification. If we have an individual that was maybe involved in a car accident, the family has that need or desire that they absolutely want to see that individual, we can do that at the morgue. If we want to take photographs in a secured setting, and it is a secured setting, there's an exterior lock on the door and our refrigeration units also have the capability of being locked. So when we have an investigation going on, that's locked and the keys are turned over to the law enforcement agency and they maintain control of the morgue that way. So the major uses would be for the actual autopsy occasionally and for storage of bodies. Anything else we might use some more for? Probably not. No, other than our specific purpose, like if we wanted to do some testing, take blood samples, if we had a traffic fatality that we wanted to take a sample from or any reason that we had to take samples, we would take them to the morgue and do our sampling there and send the samples off and hold the body there until sometimes you have a death someplace, a car accident is most likely, or you don't have a next of kin right away, so you wouldn't have a funeral home so that we would take the body to the morgue, pending notification of the next of kin and finding out who the funeral home would be. Okay, thank you, very interesting. So when someone passes on, generally are you contacted by law enforcement to arrive or who makes that first contact? Well, that all depends where the death occurred. If it's in the hospital emergency room, the emergency room would contact us if it's a home death, we've been contacted by law enforcement or we've been contacted. Sometimes families will call their funeral director and the funeral directors will make contact or if it's a hospice death, the hospice nurse gives us a call. And we're on a paging system, we have a phone in my office that after three rings it transfers down from my office to my chief deputies office and if he's not at home and it transfers to the sheriff's department, they will make one more attempt to call the office. If they can't reach us, then they will page us and each deputy has a pager. So after you've gone on site and determined the manner of death, obviously the body needs to be cared for and there's likely loved ones involved who are grieving and what's your role in that regard? What's the next step? Well, what'll happen is we'll get called to a home. We'll talk with, do our cursory investigation, talk to the family, ask them if they have a funeral home preference. If they do, we'll ask them if they're ready. They have the funeral home called or if there's other family members coming to the home and sometimes they want the body to stay there until someone can get there from not too far off. We'll call the funeral home forum and the funeral home will come and make the removal of the body to the funeral home. What'll happen then is the funeral home will get that death certificate mailed to me or brought over to generally, bring them over to my residence and we'll fill out the cause and manner of death and all the lines that have to be completed for the death certificate. Learn from you that there are essentially four forms of final disposition. Would you please share those? Sure, probably the most common that a person hears about is burial. That's a traditional in-ground burial. There's also called entombment where you're in a mausoleum. You can have also cremation where the body is cremated and you then have the ashes that can be kept by the individual or they can be interred in the ground or on a mausoleum or they can be scattered at the cemetery scattering area. And there's also a scientific donation where the body is given to science or given to the medical colleges to further research for medical students. And of those four, you sign off on the cremation permits. Is that correct? Right, even if it would not be a coroner's case, if it was someone that died in the hospital due to whatever and the doctor signed off on the death certificate and the family has chosen cremation, my office would have to view that body and sign off on the cremation permit. And the reason that is because once the body is cremated, there is nothing there if someone comes along and says, I think he died from this or whatever. So we make investigation into that death that yes, the history was there for heart disease, that there was no foul play evident. There are no markings on the body that suggests foul play, things like that. So once the body is cremated, you cannot bring it back to do further testing, samples, blood samples. You've been in this line of work now for what, 18, 20 years, you said? 20 years. And again, people may not always necessarily be happy to see you arrive at their door, but from a standpoint of the service you provide and assisting the family and helping with that transition, it's very important. Is there anything that you'd like to share with the viewers watching this that might help them if and when that happens, because at some point we're all gonna die and we're all gonna deal with death or anything that you think would be helpful for them to know to help you do your job? Well, I think one thing I would like to tell viewers it's never too early to plan. You never know when you're gonna die and so often it is suddenly. And when that happens, they're at a total loss on what to do, who to call, things like that. So I guess I would recommend to viewers that if you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, whatever, you may wanna at least talk to your family. Talk to your husband, talk to your wife, talk to your children and express your wishes on what you want done after death. If you have a preference to a funeral home or if you have a preference for burial and tournament or cremation, let those wishes be known. If you have a desire to have the back of your driver's license signed for organ or tissue donation. So often I hear that we've never talked about this. Gee, I don't know what to do. I have no idea what funeral home. And when that happens, we're there to talk with them, to say, yeah, we know it's tough time. Is there any family member you would like? Is there clergy we can call for you? Have you ever have any other family members passed away in the area? What funeral home did you use there? And sometimes I'll help to make a decision in that, well, we could call this funeral home because it's in the neighborhood and you can always change your mind. Sometimes there's that need to remove the body from the scene or from the home in a reasonable timeframe. And just to let them know that even if you call funeral home X right now and you, then you talk to your son or daughter or whatever and they say, oh no, dad wanted to go here. Mom wanted to go there. You can always change your mind. I mean, the funeral homes are wonderful in Sheboygan County and they work with the people and we've changed them quite often at the last minute because someone made a decision and then changed your mind. Like it's excellent advice. I'm 38 and I can honestly say that my wife and I haven't discussed how we want our final resting to occur and I know hospitals now more and more are asking people to even sign off on forms or provide some information to them on if you find yourself in such a state that you're unable to make decisions in a coma, something like that. So I think it's excellent advice and hopefully something that all of us will heed and talk to with our family. Like it or not, it may not be the most pleasant discussion but it's an important one. Well Dave, thank you so much for joining us today. As anticipated, very interesting. It's my pleasure. On behalf of the Sheboygan County Board, Chairman Bill Gehrig and myself Adam Payne, it was our pleasure to bring this program to you today and again thank you to David Lafine and his staff and the fine work that they do for the people of Sheboygan County. So until next time, thank you for joining us.