Staff from the District 23 Medical Examiner's Office set up to perform an X-ray using a portable unit because the office does not have the space for a dedicated radiological room. | St. Johns County
Published on December 19, 2024 at 3:10 pm
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After failing to secure state funding last year to replace its aging Medical Examiner’s Office, St. Johns County is trying again.
The chief medical examiner says it is imperative that the 20-year-old building be replaced with something bigger and more up to date.
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Dr. Wendolyn Sneed gives a number of reasons why her office needs to be fixed up:
- The poor ventilation presents a hazard when dealing with people who died due to a virus.
- The lack of space means her 13 personnel are cramped.
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- During the summers, the aging air conditioning system makes conducting autopsies even more difficult than it is to begin with.
But above all, she says, the lack of space means that St. Johns County and the surrounding counties that use the District 23 Medical Examiner’s Office would be overwhelmed in the event of a disaster.
The medical examiner’s duties
In Florida, a medical examiner’s office is not required to examine every person who dies — just the people whose deaths fall under a handful of specific criteria. The office conducts investigations on people whose deaths were accidental or by suicide, people who died because of criminal violence and people who died due to a disease that constitutes a public health threat.
The District 23 Medical Examiner’s Office services St. Johns, Flagler and Putnam counties, but St. Johns County’s explosive growth in recent years is straining the office’s resources.
With St. Johns County and Florida’s population increasing since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of cases the Medical Examiner’s Office takes on are climbing, too.
In 2020, after the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic, the Medical Examiner’s Office investigated more deaths than it did in an average year. But last year, the office had around the same number of cases as it did during the height of the pandemic.
And as the area’s growing population has affected schools and first responders, Chief Medical Examiner Sneed says that trend is only going to continue.
“Since we’ve been in this office, we’ve gone up about 60% in caseload,” she tells Jacksonville Today. “I’m expecting that number to increase as well, possibly within the next 25 years almost double what we have right now.”
Right now, the office has storage for 22 bodies at a time, and Sneed says that storage is nearly always at at least half capacity.
“We have outgrown our cooler space,” she says.
In the event of a “mass casualty event,” which Sneed describes as any tragedy that would overstress the Medical Examiner’s Office, they would need to request assistance from the state in the form of generators and portable coolers.
Sneed has worked through disaster recovery firsthand — she worked in Broward County’s Medical Examiner’s Office after the Parkland school shooting in 2018.
“I know that we don’t have mass fatalities all the time, but when it happens, it happens,” Sneed says. “If we were to have a mass casualty tonight … I would have to call my administrator and have her ask for help from the Florida Emergency Mortuary System.”
There’s other reasons Sneed says a new office would benefit her team too. The office’s file storage has spilled over into its kitchen space; the security could use some improvements; and there’s no dedicated space where members of Sneed’s team can sit and talk with people about sensitive matters without being interrupted by other office operations.
“We have no family room, so when the families come, if the conference room is being used, we’re talking to those grieving families in the lobby where everybody comes in and out,” Sneed says. “You know, you’re giving this information in the most vulnerable of times, and FedEx is coming, and law enforcement is coming in and out.”
A new strategy?
Last year, the Florida Legislature OK’d $11.7 million in state funding for St. Johns County’s Medical Examiner’s Office, but Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed the measure along with more than $900 million for projects across the state.
This next year, the county hopes that — with the support of its local representatives, as well as the state attorney, local sheriffs and more — things will be different.
St. Johns County’s intergovernmental affairs director says they plan to ask for the funding in phases this time instead of all at once.
“This approach better aligns our request with the budgetary objectives of the governor and the Legislature,” Adam Tecler says. “We’re grateful for the governor’s continued focus on improving critical infrastructure in Northeast Florida. If funded by the Legislature, we will ask the governor to give this regional priority project a second look.”
If the county gets the money and is able to build a new space for Sneed and her team, she says it will make everyone’s jobs much, much easier.
At the very least, she would stop having to worry about the limited space she has for all the staff and work the office has to accommodate.
“Do you know that game Tetris? It feels like that,” Sneed says, laughing. “I’m gonna move one block here so I can move this other block. And then when I’m done with this block, I’m gonna move this block back so I can keep going. That’s how it feels in the back now.”
