Sonoma County morgue grapples with backlog, long delays
In the past two years, hundreds of unfinished autopsy reports have piled up in boxes at the Sonoma County morgue, delaying court proceedings in criminal cases and leaving grieving family members in limbo as they await final death certificates.
The massive backlog at the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office has kept the siblings of Petaluma mortgage broker Dean Ratto waiting for a death certificate for nearly 10 months. The 36-year-old died in December, and his family still cannot close his bank accounts or handle other matters of his estate.
“I’m looking for an explanation,” said one of Ratto’s older brothers, Lance Ratto of Marin County. “Is this just a file sitting on the desk, a dispute between (the doctor) and the county and you’re not doing any further work? If there is a valid explanation we’ll continue waiting, but this just seems not normal.”
Lynn Harenberg-Miller, 58, of Petaluma started calling the morgue every two weeks after her husband’s unexpected death in January, but didn’t find out until July that the preliminary cause of death had been ruled out. Nearly seven months after he died, she’s just now getting accounts into her name.
“This is ludicrous. People’s lives depend on getting these things tied up and finalized,” said Harenberg-Miller, who was married for 22 years. “Just dealing with the paperwork, it’s taken all of my internal strength to handle that. It has taken so long.”
At the backlog’s peak in late spring and early summer, nearly 400 cases were beyond national standards that recommend the bulk of death cases should take no more than 90 days between autopsy and the completion of the report required to get a final death certificate, Sheriff Steve Freitas said.
The backlog has delayed some criminal proceedings and the Sonoma County District Attorney’s review of deaths involving law enforcement and the jail, but the vast majority of cases involve people who died outside of hospitals and require a forensic pathologist to determine cause.
A final death certificate can be critical for closing bank accounts, accessing retirement plans and handling other estate matters after a death. While some institutions will accept a preliminary death certificate, others require a cause of death be known. For some survivors, finding out how a loved one died is a crucial step in the grieving process.
Freitas admits that making families wait many months or, in some cases, a year to get a death certificate is not how he wants the Coroner’s Office to operate.
Though he became aware of the problem in 2012, it took nearly two years and a grand jury inquiry before his office hammered out a plan to start clearing cases with Forensic Medical Group Inc., or FMG, the Fairfield company that it has hired to provide forensic pathologist services.
“You learn the most from mistakes,” Freitas said.
Resolving the backlog has been among the top priorities for the Sheriff’s Office this year, spurring many “uncomfortable phone calls and emails from me” to FMG, Freitas said.
Facing the threat of a possible lawsuit or fines imposed by the county, FMG has agreed to clear the backlog before the end of January 2015. FMG president Dr. Kelly Arthur-Kenny, who has served as Sonoma County’s chief forensic pathologist since 2006, said she expects to be done well before that time.
Complex factors cited
FMG provides the primary forensic pathology services for six counties, including Sonoma, and assists in an additional 12 counties. It has three full-time doctors, including Arthur-Kenny, and one part-time doctor.
The root of the backlog is a complex set of factors including a national shortage of forensic pathologists, a series of time-consuming death investigations and allegations of mismanagement on both the part of FMG and the Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office and FMG don’t agree on all of the factors.
Cases began piling up toward the end of 2011, according to Arthur-Kenny and coroner staff. This year, the backlog reached about 400 cases, Arthur-Kenny and coroner staff said. The oldest death still pending is from April 2012; however, most have been completed through summer 2013, according to the doctor. By mid-September, the doctor said, she had reduced that list to fewer than 250 cases.
Arthur-Kenny said that she accepts some responsibility for the backlog because when cases started piling up, she didn’t speak up.
“I wasn’t being reasonable with myself or with them,” she said, referring to coroner staff. “They’d say, ‘We need this,’ and I’d always say ‘yes.’ I’ve stopped doing that because it only led to disappointment.”
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