May 2, 2014 4 min read

The Washington County commissioners dealt with both death and taxes – fees, really – in one agenda item Thursday, allocating up to $174,000 in death certificate fees for Washington Hospital to move and remodel the morgue at the request of Coroner Tim Warco.

In exchange, the agreement between the county and the hospital calls for the coroner to have the right to use the morgue for 16 years from the completion of the remodeled facility.

“We are moving forward with a state-of-the-art autopsy room,” Warco said. “It’s a joint effort of community service with the Washington Hospital.”

He noted the proposed project is less expensive than the county constructing its own morgue. Bucks County, near Philadelphia, recently spent about $7 million building Bucks County’s first forensic facility. “And they have to staff it,” Warco said outside the commissioners’ meeting.

The coroner’s office performs autopsies to determine cause and manner of death in cases where the possibility of legal proceedings may arise due to injury, fall, motor vehicle accident, drug overdose, or under suspicious circumstances such as suicide or murder, according to its website.

The morgue will be moved to a more secluded part of the hospital, said Brook Ward, Washington Hospital executive vice president and chief operating officer, and it will be larger. Warco said those in attendance at autopsies are the coroner, deputy coroner, technician, police officer or officers, pathologist, and often students of nursing or other medical professions.

Ward was unsure how long the hospital, which was built with a morgue in the 1920s, has had an informal agreement allowing the county to perform autopsies there, but it goes back nearly 80 years, said county Solicitor J. Lynn DeHaven.

Janet Abernathy of Washington recalled that she and her late husband, Dr. Ernest L. Abernathy, and their children moved here when he became Washington Hospital’s pathologist.

“We came in 1955 and there was definitely a morgue,” she said during a phone call Thursday. “They used to do more autopsies.”

The bow tie-wearing Dr. Abernathy died in 1997. He was chief deputy coroner under Warco’s predecessor, the late Farrell Jackson, who took office in 1970 and outlived Abernathy by 10 years.

The hospital itself conducts fewer than 10 autopsies a year, typically unexpected deaths. It could transport the bodies to Pittsburgh, but the hospital maintains the practice locally as a courtesy to family members who request it.

The Washington County coroner’s office, however, is seeing an uptick in drug overdose deaths. For example, there were two deaths attributed to drug overdoses in 1992, while in 2013, there were 58. Warco had a total of 218 deaths from various causes listed in his report last year as “actual coroner’s cases.” During the coroner’s first year in office, 1992, 61 autopsies were performed. In 2013, there were 157.

“We can help the county out so they don’t have to spend a lot of money,” Ward said. “We can be a good corporate citizen and do what’s right for the county and those who live and work here and pay taxes.”

Warco could have autopsies done in Pittsburgh, but he cited two reasons for keeping the task in Washington: shorter turnaround time between removing a body from a death scene until the body is returned to surviving family members and the convenience of police not having to travel to Allegheny County.

A 2004 state law allows part of the fee for death certificates to be paid into a vital statistics improvement account, a third of which can be used for expenses such as laboratory or autopsy room modernization, including supplies, equipment, training and office and laboratory facility improvement or the modernization of equipment used for forensic investigation, according to a Pennsylvania Legislative Services summary.