EVERETT — When an ex-employee with the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office wrote to top county officials early this year with a list of concerns about how the office was being run, it triggered an internal county investigation.
The whistle-blower’s letter suggested that high turnover and poor management decisions were hurting the quality of death investigations overseen by Dr. Norman Thiersch and his staff at the medical examiner’s office.
The resulting probe was conducted by county human resources director Bridget Clawson at County Executive Aaron Reardon’s request. In a March memo, Clawson reached largely favorable conclusions about how the office was being run.
Clawson’s report also left some in county government scratching their heads.
In it, she asserted there are reasons to question the credibility, and in one case the sanity, of some who no longer work at the medical examiner’s office. The people singled out for some of the harshest criticism include highly trained forensic doctors who have provided key testimony in murder trials and other criminal cases.
The Herald interviewed most of the people named in Clawson’s report. All have gone on to successful careers elsewhere. They were aghast that the county’s top human services official would write potentially damaging things about them without seeking their input or letting them respond.
Most spoke privately with the newspaper, saying that Clawson’s report is not only inaccurate but contains allegations they consider potentially libelous.
Clawson’s report was supplied to The Herald and others under open-records laws.
One county employee even wrote Clawson a pointed e-mail to deny making disparaging remarks about one former medical examiner’s office worker attributed to her in the report and to ask why they were included.
The County Council last month called for a thorough, outside look at the medical examiner’s office.
“I just felt that it needed to be independent,” County Council Chairman Dave Gossett said.
One of Reardon’s executive directors, Peter Camp, has completed a second internal report that will be delivered to Gossett by Monday.
It is not the independent investigation the council requested. Rather, Camp’s report includes his own survey of local funeral homes to gauge their relationship with the medical examiner’s office and also looks at some workplace issues, Reardon spokesman Christopher Schwarzen said.
Reardon had requested Camp look into the issues before the council’s request for an third-party investigation, Schwarzen said. On Friday, Gossett stressed that an independent review of the medical examiner’s office —not another internal investigation— is what the county needs.
The price for that future inquiry is unknown. It would come on top of the roughly $180,000 officials have authorized since last summer on probes of county workplace problems. There are two pending personnel investigations in the Public Works Department. An audit has been completed of the department overseeing the county’s computer systems. Investigations also have been conducted of the office that handles workplace complaints and into the sexually charged behavior on a Redmond golf course that led to criminal charges against the county’s former planning director.
The medical examiner’s office oversees the county morgue and is responsible for assisting police and prosecutors with death investigations. It has a $1.9 million annual budget and about a dozen employees.
Questions about high turnover and employee dissatisfaction have dogged the office. A 2006 employee survey found a high level of dissatisfaction.
There have been questions from families waiting months for a cause of death on deceased relatives.
A few funeral homes also have criticized the condition of bodies after autopsies by Snohomish County — allegations that were the central focus of a Seattle television station’s investigative report in mid-May, which suggested that “mutilation” was occurring.
Hundreds of pages of public documents and interviews with a half dozen former medical examiner’s office workers suggest that at least some of the questions about management of the medical examiner’s office have merit.
The review Gossett and his colleagues want to see would include a confidential query of all medical examiner’s office employees, past and present, as well as information from all funeral homes providing service in the county.
Early this year, the former medical examiner’s office employee who wrote to the County Council and Reardon listed concerns about the office, including staff turnover.
“We researched it and found there was no there there,” Camp said.
One position in particular, the associate medical examiner, has been something of a revolving door.
Five forensic pathologists have left the job since 1998, when Thiersch was hired to lead the office.
Clawson, the human resources director, drafted a March 1 report to explain the turnover rate and other issues the former employee had raised with county leaders. Instead of providing clarity, it might have added to the confusion.
Clawson’s report was released during a tumultuous period, after the resignation of the county’s Equal Employment Opportunity investigator amid evidence of shoddy documentation of workplace complaints.
In her review of the medical examiner’s office, Clawson suggested there were problems other than management concerns that explained why the pathologists left.
Her conclusions left the former employees she named baffled.
In one case, Clawson went so far as to suggest one worker was mentally unstable. As evidence, she attributed the remark to Susan Neely, now a County Council analyst who was a top manager in the executive’s office until her resignation in 2006.
After reading the report in March, Neely immediately e-mailed Clawson to say she didn’t recall making any such statement. Regardless, Neely added, that statement should not have been “included in any written record.”
Drs. Daniel Selove and Gina Fino, forensic pathologists who left part-time jobs at the county early in Thiersch’s tenure for full-time work, were troubled by the tone of Clawson’s report. Both are now established consultants who work throughout the state.
“The medical examiner’s office was a difficult place to work and I felt a little weird that she said I just quit,” Fino said. “It was more of a resignation, a usual parting of two professionals.”
Prosecuting Attorney Mark Roe, who has long helped oversee the county’s criminal caseload, said he has discussed the high turnover rate with Thiersch.
The cost of bringing back former associate medical examiners to testify at trials has cost the county about $8,200 since 2001, Roe said. While that isn’t a huge sum, the prosecutor said he wants to avoid all extra expense.
“At times, it became something of a hassle,” said Roe, who reports a good working relationship with Thiersch. “I don’t believe it ever affected our ability to present a case.”
Paul Stern is a longtime deputy prosecutor who frequently works with the medical examiner’s office on homicide cases. He’s written a recommendation letter for at least one of the former associate medical examiners singled out for criticism in Clawson’s report. Stern’s letter describes the man as “a wonderful colleague to work with and a professional in all aspects.”
The deputy prosecutor also has good things to say about Thiersch, whom he describes as “outstandingly thorough and complete” and a great witness.
“He may not be the most warm and fuzzy guy, but there has never been a question of his clarity in testifying,” Stern said. “I am not aware of a time when jurors have been confused by or unimpressed by his testimony.”
Others in the criminal justice system share concerns about the tensions they’ve seen building at the medical examiner’s office, but they are reluctant to speak about them in public out of concern for making them worse. They describe instances of Thiersch treating seasoned investigators with seeming disregard for their abilities and say the doctor’s formal, deliberate manner is at times frustrating for detectives working hard to close a case.
Thiersch has come under criticism for sometimes taking months to provide detectives with even a tentative ruling on the cause of a victim’s death.
Thiersch declined to be interviewed for this story and referred questions back to Reardon’s office.
Management has been an issue for the union that represents medical examiner’s office employees, but inadequate funding may be even more pressing, said James Trefry, a staff representative for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Early this year, the office’s investigators struggled to cover around-the-clock shifts seven days a week. They asked for permission to fill two vacant jobs for investigators, but the County Council allowed them to fill only one.
“There may still be some management issues, but if you remove the constant stressor of staff shortages and budget issues, some of that falls by the wayside,” Trefry said. “Turnover is a problem, too, in terms of people coming and going from the office.”
Trefry said the 2006 employee survey that found high levels of dissatisfaction could have alerted county leaders to management issues at the office, but “a lot of the recommendations of that report were largely ignored or minimized.”
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, nhaglund@heraldnet.com.
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