Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
- Dr. Deirdre Amaro leads Utah's unique statewide medical examiner's office, focusing on death investigations.
- The office prioritizes learning from deaths and supports families, with a focus on suicides and overdoses.
- Utah's office is known for its in-house epidemiology team and innovative tissue donation practices.
TAYLORSVILLE — Dr. Deirdre Amaro wanted to be a physician, but as she successfully worked her way through medical school and actually became a doctor, she learned something vital about herself: She hates suffering. And often, that's what sick patients are doing. It's even worse, she said, when the patient is a child.
"Suffering gets to me," she said.
So Amaro changed the direction of her medical career. Utah's chief medical examiner, who took the post in June, still gets to help people, but her patients are "no longer suffering." And the help she provides remains focused on the living — the family and other loved ones who want answers and a measure of peace after someone they care about dies. The office also prioritizes learning from deaths so that future ones can be forestalled.
Sometimes, that degree of comfort is delayed, at times by many years. There's little that's more satisfying than identifying someone whose remains were a mystery, sometimes for decades, and reuniting their bodies with those who have searched and wondered what happened.
Recently, as Amaro and some of her staff gave local reporters a tour of the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner in Taylorsville, she very nearly literally jumped for joy when answering how satisfying she found it when her staff successfully identified someone who'd been missing and had for a time been a Jane or John Doe.
"That's very exciting," she said, a huge smile on her face.
Amaro's also now at the helm of an unusual — even perhaps unique in some ways — medical examiner's office.
Just 11 states, including Utah, have a statewide medical examiner instead of a version of a local elected coroner to lead death investigations. Sometimes, that elected official has little or no investigative or medical experience. Utah's office has a dozen highly trained forensic pathology experts and a number of trained and certified medical investigators, as well. The office is accredited by the National Association of Medical Examiners.
Utah's was the first medical examiner's office to rent out a pair of surgical suites onsite to organizations that collect donor tissue and long bones, which can benefit up to 100 people. The Utah Lions Eye Bank and Donor Connection rent the suites so donated eyes, skin and long bones can be recovered without having to transport the bodies of the donors elsewhere first, which sometimes means the tissue is no longer suitable for donation because of the time that has passed. The result is a higher number of successful tissue donations.
Utah is one of few death investigation offices that has an in-house epidemiology team. Suicide and drug overdoses are both significant areas of focus. Utah's office is also the only one that interviews family members in cases of overdose. It often offers some grief support and outreach for families. Medical examiners regularly deal with family members and hope to help them understand what happened as they unravel the circumstances of the deaths within their purview.
Part of the office's focus is on gathering data on such deaths to help prevent future similar deaths. It also looks at disease processes. When COVID-19 was new, for instance, the office studied the effect of the virus on bodies to help untangle how it killed.
"We took a deep dive," said chief medical investigator Dr. Cory Russo.
That the system is statewide allows for uniform and high-quality data collection, among other benefits, the officials said.
The death investigation
The Utah medical examiner's office has oversight of specific deaths: those that are sudden, unexpected or happen in suspicious circumstances. Those deaths could include accidents, homicides, suicides and deaths where it's not clear what happened. Children's deaths are in their purview. Staff members interact with families, law enforcement, hospitals and care providers, among others. Not all investigations lead to a full review, including autopsy.
Just over a third of deaths in Utah fall under the jurisdiction of the office. It investigated 7,899 deaths in 2023. Medical examiners don't investigate or do autopsies on Sundays, though they receive bodies around the clock. That means Mondays can be very busy, with as many as 24 autopsies. Most days, they average about 10 which, without complications, take about an hour each.
Native American remains are returned to tribes, as they have their own jurisdiction.
As chief medical investigator, Russo leads a team that starts its work with a scene investigation to learn more about the life that ended and how that happened. Trained investigators photograph the scene and collect evidence that will help the medical examiners reach conclusions.
The goal is to answer two questions. Cause of death is the injury, illness or disease that killed the person. Manner of death is different and limited to five categories: natural, accident, homicide, suicide or undetermined.
Family members and even friends are asked for information that helps complete the picture of the person's life, to help the medical examiner understand and explain how he or she died.
After the body is examined carefully, there's an autopsy, where internal organs are examined and weighed. The purpose is to find disease or injury that may have caused or contributed to death. Sometimes, the examination includes toxicology, tissue samples and even genetic testing. Toxicology results can take weeks and it could be months before all the work is done on an individual death and a report completed. They also look through medical and law enforcement records to glean relevant information.
