The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner – Coroner is located in Los Angeles County, California, USA. Its purpose is to investigate the cause and manner of all sudden, violent, and unusual deaths in the County of Los Angeles.
Manner of death describes the circumstances surrounding the death. Some major types of manner of death include homicide, suicide, accident, natural, and unknown. Cause of death refers to the specific disease or injury that is responsible for the lethal sequence of events. Common causes of death include gunshot wounds, asphyxia, burns, cancer, and acute myocardial infarction.
The LA Medical Examiner – Coroner gets roughly 17,000 death inquiries per year. Of the 17,000 inquiries it receives, it autopsies roughly 4,000 of them, for an autopsy rate of almost 25%. This is more than twice than the autopsy rate for deaths in Japan.
The LA Medical Examiner – Coroner has over 200 employees, including 25 medical examiners, 25 investigators, 10 criminalists, and many others. It has the capacity of holding over 500 bodies in refrigeration, and has 4 autopsy rooms with a total of 11 autopsy tables. On a busy day, there may be as many as 20 autopsies performed.
The LA Medical Examiner – Coroner has a fully functional toxicology laboratory that handles all of the required toxicology needs for the autopsied cases in the County. There are about 10 criminalists who perform forensic toxicological analysis on blood and tissue specimens collected at autopsy. The analyses include tests for alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, opiates, pharmaceutical drugs, and many other compounds. To handle these analyses, the criminalists rely on instruments such as gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, and liquid chromatograph – tandem mass spectrometers.
Because of the large number of cases, the medical examiners use a system of ordering toxicology tests based on the nature of the case and the preliminary autopsy findings. It would be impossible to test every autopsy case for every type of drug, so there is an ordering system that the medical examiners use to request certain tests. This allows the criminalists to narrow their focus to only the tests that are actually required to help determine the cause of death or the circumstances surrounding the case.