Coroner Warren McLeod talks about suicide deaths at his office Monday afternoon in Chehalis.
The Lewis County Coroner’s Office and the board of commissioners recently worked out a budgetary deal that officials believe will alleviate extensive waiting periods for toxicology results to return from the Washington State Patrol lab.
After commissioners initially denied a request for an additional $5,500 in the coroner’s budget to send toxicology samples to a private lab rather than the state, the prosecutor’s office agreed to shell out $4,000 of its budget to pay for annual training for coroner’s office staff. The money the coroner’s office would have paid for training will instead go toward paying to send toxicology samples to the private lab.
WSP has been laden with a dramatic increase in marijuana-induced driving under the influence cases, and coroners across the state have seen toxicology results delayed for as much as seven months as criminal cases take precedence over death investigations.
Lewis County has traditionally sent samples to WSP, because they don’t charge counties for toxicology results.
On average, 25 Lewis County cases are pending toxicology per year, said Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod. The $4,000 will pay for 18 cases, and will come into the budget January. If, in 2019, that $4,000 starts to run low and more cases pending toxicology crop up, McLeod said he’ll talk with the commissioners during his monthly meeting with the board. If they don’t allocate more money his way, McLeod said his office will revert back to the WSP lab.
McLeod said the private lab — NMS Labs — will be able to return results typically in six days, or seven at the most. Additionally, a new case management system allows the lab to upload results digitally, cutting down even more time.
Cases will only be sent to this lab when the cause and manner of death are pending toxicology, said McLeod. Typically, many of these cases are possible drug overdoses.
McLeod said this could benefit criminal cases tied to drug overdoses. County authorities have, historically, secured convictions on drug dealers who delivered a fatal dose.
Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer reflected that sentiment.
“Cases don’t typically get better with time, so the sooner you can get that information, the sooner you can follow up on leads,” said Meyer.
“It’s important that we come up with causes of death in cases where the coroner believes overdose is at least a contributing factor if not the main cause. And that’s because if there’s a hybrid strain of drugs out there — we’ve seen fentanyl-laced heroin and stuff like that — it’s important that we know those things as soon as possible so that we can get the word out to the public,” he said.
For McLeod, the largest benefit is getting information to families faster. In a previous interview with The Chronicle, he detailed a conversation he had with a mother who had been waiting seven months for results to reveal the cause of her son’s death.
“For me, the main reason is the compassion of the family … and for the law enforcement and public safety side, too. Waiting seven months to determine that something’s been an overdose, and then try to build any kind of case or look at it investigatively is kind of a long time,” he said.
