Protesters join Metro Gardens Association President Lydia Bell, right, on Friday, June 27, 2025, at the federal courthouse in Jacksonville. The group is seeking an injunction to stop a medical examiner's office from opening in their Brentwood community. | Michelle Corum, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 27, 2025 at 2:07 pm
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A neighborhood group in North Jacksonville is asking a federal judge to stop the city’s new medical examiner’s office from opening just blocks from a school and their homes, saying it threatens their health, safety and dignity.
The request for an injunction, filed June 20, comes just a year after the Metro Gardens Neighborhood Association sued the city to stop the 51,000-square-foot office.
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Association leaders have long pushed for the city to stop building the $62.84 million facility on North Davis Street, saying it is only 32 feet from the KIPP Voice Academy’s elementary and middle school-aged students. They also say the “morgue,” as they call it, is an industrial facility that does not belong in their neighborhood in Brentwood, a block off Golfair Boulevard.
Speaking Friday in front of the federal courthouse Downtown, neighborhood association President Lydia Bell said she wants a federal judge to weigh in on what she considers a litany of problems of having the facility near a school and homes.
“I want them to just read on it and if you can find any wrong in this, then they need to rule on it,” Bell said. “But if they listen to us and we have a fair judge, they will find that they broke every law in the book to put that morgue in our neighborhood.”
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Residents are concerned that property values of homes near the medical examiner’s office will go down due to “stigma and real environmental risks,” according to a news release from the association.
“It is time to stop using the Black community as a dumping ground for facilities that would never be built in white communities,” the news release says.
The statement also claims the decision to put the facility in Brentwood “was made without public notice, environmental impact review, or meaningful community consultation.”
Bell also said the facility will bring air quality and respiratory problems, headaches, nausea and other risks for children, asthmatics and the elderly.
City spokesperson Phillip Perry said the city will not comment about the injunction filing “due to active litigation.” He did say the new facility will be completed by September and turned over to the medical examiner’s office in November.
City officials broke ground in May 2023 on the new medical examiner’s office at 4368 N. Davis St. The office is just over a mile north of the current office, which began as a one-story facility in 1968, with an addition and a second floor added later. A portable cooler to handle the bodies and a mobile office also have been added for the facility’s seven pathologists.
The 57-year-old facility on North Jefferson Street has dealt with an average of 2,000 autopsies a year. It can handle a maximum of 45 bodies but has been at capacity several times in recent years, city documents show.
Metro Gardens residents have been protesting the new medical examiner’s office since the groundbreaking. Their 2024 lawsuit is set for a non-jury trial July 24 2026.
The suit states that the city did not inform them of its intentions to build the facility. The suit also said the area was rezoned from commercial property to public property, after the 2023 groundbreaking. The group’s lawsuit also claims the city didn’t tell the community about the facility, which residents say violates city ordinances.
The neighborhood also fought a planned liquor store on Golfair Boulevard, next to the KIPP school and a block from the medical examiner’s office, demanding it be turned into a community center.
When the city converted that liquor store into a Small and Emerging Business Entrepreneurship and Workforce Development Center in May, community members protested, saying this decision was made without notifying them.
