The county coroner’s office is an unassuming one: a blue plastic placard on the door on the ground floor of the old hospital on North H Street, in Aberdeen, down the hall from the elevators and cafeteria. A small reception area, a glimpse of hospital-ish hardware in the back areas. No miasma of decay, no splatter trail of unknowable fluids on tile floors, nothing macabre save for a “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” theme executed in three little skeletons on the front desk.

Likewise, George Kelley isn’t a stereotypical image of a county coroner: there are no suspenders, horn-rimmed glasses or “I do declares” in evidence.

Elected and taking the position beginning on the first of the year, Kelley has a vision for the office that includes less golf breaks and bourbon with the county commissioners on the veranda than that imaginary county coroner and more engagement with the public and a more active role for the office and its small but specialized team of county employees.

“January 1st was my very first day,” Kelley said in an interview. “I got here about 6:30 in the morning on that Sunday and asked myself, ‘what the heck did I do.’”

Close to home

A Grays Harbor lad in flesh and bone, Kelley enlisted as a military policeman in the Marine Corps, serving in North Carolina, before returning to Washington and serving in various law enforcement organizations for about 36 years, all told.

“Dad was deputy sheriff for Grays Harbor,” Kelley said. “Law enforcement has been in my blood for long before I can remember.”

For much of that time, he says with good-natured frankness, he wasn’t entirely clear on what the coroner did.

“This job was one of those things that I always thought was outside my realm. Over 30-something-years, you go to your fair of death calls,” Kelley said. “I honestly just thought they just called the funeral homes.”

As Kelley looked into retiring from the police, he revised his thinking, seeking more knowledge about the position.

“In the last three, four years it was one of those things that started piquing my interest,” Kelley said. “I started looking into what the coroner’s office does. I did that before I decided to run.”

Treating people with respect, be they from whatever strata of society, is important to the job, Kelley said; every death should be treated with dignity.

“Over the course of these years, I’ve gained a lot of empathy. What I’ve always focused on is respect for anyone I’m dealing with. Whether it’s the unhoused person on the street to someone who owns a mansion, I’ve always tried to treat people with respect,” Kelley said. “Bottom line is, we’re all going to die. We’re all going to die. An unhoused person doesn’t deserve any less respect.”

Taxes may no longer be inevitable if you’re a major corporation or a billionaire but humanity hasn’t figured out a way to beat death yet. For that ultimate finality, Kelley said, he wants the coroner’s office to be open, compassionate and supportive of those residents suffering a loss.

“The biggest thing I want to do is pull back the veil,” Kelley said. “We’re all gonna die. We don’t want to. We want that to be as far down the road as possible. But I want our people to be there for the families.”

Demystifying the office

The coroner’s office doesn’t perform autopsies, or many of the other functions assigned to it by criminal investigation shows, said chief deputy coroner and longtime member of the office Ryan Meister: its chief function is investigation and research into the deaths, discerning a cause by working with the many resources available to them.

“People get that kind of Hollywood image of our coroners,” Meister said in an interview. “Coroners are not pathologists. Pathologists are the ones who do the autopsies. We do the investigations.”

A coroner’s job can start a few different ways, from getting a call from a county police or fire department, or seeing something on the dispatch system, Kelley said.

“Typically what’ll happen, the fire department or police department will get a call about an unresponsive person not breathing for example. They’ll get on scene and say, this person is dead,” Kelley said. “They’ll call us, and we’ll perform a whole separate investigation. We’ll take our photographs. We’ll perform an external examination of the body, looking for wounds or anything else they’ve missed.”

They’ll also assist in readying the body for transport to its next destination; to a funeral home, or perhaps to their own office in the case of a suspicious death, Kelley said. The office acquired a four-body fridge last August, Meister said. Having their own fridge is ideal for maintaining chain of custody in a criminal investigation, or in the case of overflow in the county’s funeral homes, Kelley said.

Having personnel from the coroner’s office present also frees up police or fire personnel to get back to work instead of waiting around for the funeral home personnel to show up, Kelley said.

“From my past law enforcement experience, rather than waiting for a funeral home to get there, we can get there,” Kelley said. “It frees them up so they can get back to what they need to do.”

Not every death will be heralded by a visit from the coroner’s office, Kelley said.

“Hospital deaths and hospice deaths, we don’t typically go to those. That’s an expected death,” Kelley said. “All deaths have to be reported to the coroner’s office. All deaths get reported to our office, one way or the other. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time.”

But it’s his priority to get to the other kind of departure, Kelley said: the accidental, the suspicious, the unexpected, to help the family move through the steps and to make the whole process official, as they determine a cause of death and the treatment of the remains.

“If an officer calls us and says, ‘We think we need the coroner here,’ we’re going,” Kelley said. “That’s my goal. If it’s a sudden and unexpected death, we go to it.”

Autopsies are handled by medical professionals; Grays Harbor contracts out, typically to Thurston County, to perform them where required, Kelley said. Toxicology screens in particular are not an overnight process, Kelley said.

“It’s unfortunately not like NCIS,” Kelley said. “It can take months.”

The county currently has 13 deaths from last year pending results from tests that will clarify the cause of death, Kelley said.

“There’s a lot of data entry. We have open cases that have been open for months waiting for autopsy and toxicology,” Kelley said. “I thought I had a lot of paperwork as a police officer.”

A growing caseload

The job isn’t a comfortable sinecure for a long-time resident of the county. More people living means more people dying, Kelley said.

“Last year, for the entire year, there was 906 deaths reported to the coroner’s office, which is a lot, I thought,” Kelley said. “I found the number has increased by 8-10% each year. I think part of that is the increasing population and aging population of Grays Harbor.”

The far-and-away majority of that are natural causes, Kelley said, with 817 out of 906 of 2022’s deaths cited as natural causes. But every death needs to go through the office, and some are more difficult to investigate than others — even a straightforward death will take up about three hours on-scene, without even considering the paperwork to follow, Kelley said.

“Fortunately we don’t have a lot of unidentified people,” Kelley said. “Sometimes they can get DNA, sometimes they can’t.”

Kelley said that in addition to getting to more of the deaths in the county, he’s aiming to visit more lives as well, working with civic groups, emergency agencies and even schools, if possible.

“That’s another reason it’s good to get out there. They see the coroner and what we do,” Kelley said. “This office is not just me. The people here are what makes this office.”

Those people, alongside himself, will do the job, the heart and soul of which is investigating the deaths, Kelley said.

“That’s part of the beauty of this job. It gives us the chance to dig into it and find out, oh, there’s not anything to it. It’s just an accidental death,” Kelley said. “We’re following up on leads all the time.”

Contact reporter Michael S. Lockett at 757-621-1197 or mlockett@thedailyworld.com.