Medical examiner's fitful gains
TWO YEARS isn't enough time to undo decades of neglect at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Massachusetts. Yet the people there deserve all the support necessary from the state to do their job -- performing autopsies that pinpoint the cause of suspicious death. With increased support from the Legislature and the Patrick administration, Dr. Mark Flomenbaum, the examiner, will be able to continue the improvements he has made in the office.
Flomenbaum came to Massachusetts from New York in 2005 after an uproar over allegations that the wrong eyeballs were examined for evidence of shaken-baby syndrome in an infant's death. But mistakes are bound to happen when the office is underfunded and overworked.
After that scandal, the Legislature increased funding from $3.6 million to $7.7 million. The number of autopsies rose from 2,694 in 2005 to 3,552 last year, partly because Flomenbaum hired investigators to make on-the-spot decisions about whether an autopsy is needed. Such innovations should be encouraged by his superiors at the Executive Office of Public Safety.
Because of this increased work and the closing of offices in Pocasset and Worcester, bodies are stacking up in a refrigerated truck outside the medical examiner's Boston headquarters, and the plumbing system clogged up once, resulting in pools of blood on the floor. This upset Kevin Burke, the new secretary of public safety, and LaDonna Hatton, undersecretary for forensic sciences and Flomenbaum's immediate superior.
Relations between Flomenbaum and Hatton, who got her job about the same time, have not been the most cordial. She has strong support among the district attorneys (Burke held that job for 24 years in the Essex district), and the new assertiveness by the medical examiner's office is offending some people at law enforcement agencies.
All three got together yesterday and agreed Flomenbaum will expedite the disposition of bodies and the Department of Public Health will check on sanitary conditions at the headquarters. Flomenbaum will file weekly progress reports with Hatton. Governor Patrick, who wanted to raise the appropriation for the office by only $200,000 in his budget, has agreed to consider increased support.
The Legislature has the final say. It needs to give the medical examiner more money than Patrick originally suggested, with special priority to reopening satellite offices.
This tempest shows that change rarely occurs without setbacks and interpersonal strife. But it is encouraging that top officials are monitoring the medical examiner's office to make sure it has the resources for its job. State government is finally making amends for the slighting of an important task: to make sure no death in Massachusetts goes unexplained. 