County Morgues Go Under the Knife

The bodies line up in the morning at Wayne County’s Detroit morgue, each bagged on a steel gurney awaiting an autopsy by one of five pathologists. That’s three fewer doctors than the county could afford a year ago. It’s a hectic place: Besides run-of-the mill cases such as drug overdoses and auto accidents, Wayne County’s morgue handles plenty of homicide victims. The Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn metropolitan area ranks No. 2 in the nation for murder and negligent manslaughter, at 18.2 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to the FBI. For Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Carl Schmidt and his 30-person crew, it’s not just working on 2,400 corpses a year that’s a strain. “The paperwork is astounding,” says Schmidt, who’s lost some 40 percent of his staff to spending cutbacks since 2007.

The red tape contributed to a gruesome backlog in 2009 and 2010, when the morgue was forced to stack up unclaimed bodies—at one point more than 100—in a refrigerator and trailer. Some families could not afford to bury or cremate their loved ones, Schmidt says. The situation drew national attention.