COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — A partnership that helps Kootenai County with autopsies has come to an end after the Spokane County Medical Examiner abruptly terminated its contract with the Kootenai County Coroner.
For 30 years, Kootenai County would send people who died over to Spokane County when it needed autopsies done — autopsies that it can’t do itself because it doesn’t have a forensic pathologist.
Each year, the Spokane County Medical Examiner conducts around 70 autopsies for Kootenai County. Sometimes those people were victims of a crime, and an autopsy helps in the investigation.
The decades-long partnership appears to have ended with an email.
Emails obtained by Four News Now show that on December 15, the Spokane County Medical Examiner emailed the Kootenai County Coroner, stating that one of the “deputy coroners has been working closely with a disgruntled former employee of the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s office to destabilize our office operations.” Because of that, she would be terminating the partnership.
The termination took Coroner Dr. Duke Johnson by surprise. He denied those claims and wrote back “There is no way that we are ‘actively working against’ your office and have never done so.”
“Really puts our public safety in Kootenai County, in a small little situation where we have to find a transition very quickly in order to not create delays on the public safety side,” said Commissioner Bruce Mattare.
The short notice has created challenges for the county.
“With 15 days notice, it gives us very little opportunity to transition to another medical examiner office,” Mattare said.
Kootenai County is now in the process of finding a place to conduct these autopsies, and it has prompted the commissioners to issue $40,000 in emergency funds.
“We already have a facility where the coroner’s office operates out of. And so we are transitioning a room that really already has the infrastructure in place to convert that into an autopsy lab,” Mattare said.
The county commissioners say they have discussed opening up their own autopsy lab for several years. This sudden termination has rushed that process, but there is no timeline on when this new facility will be ready.
Spokane County confirmed the contract has ended but says the commissioners and the medical examiner will meet about this tomorrow.
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