Johnson County’s coroner’s office is busier than ever, and with continued population growth, it will only get busier.
By the end of this year, Johnson County Coroner Mike Pruitt expects the office to have responded to over 300 calls — 50 more than in 2021. The coroner’s office’s primary responsibility is to conduct death investigations whenever the cause of death is initially unknown. This includes overdoses, vehicle crashes and homicides.
The office also covers cases where someone is found dead in a home, they don’t have any medical or drug history, and no one knows why the person died, Pruitt said.
“Our job is to come in and get answers for the family,” he said. “In a homicide situation, it’s our job to give answers on how that individual died.”
Typically, there are an average of 1,300 deaths each year in Johnson County. This is a number Pruitt expects to increase as the county continues to grow, he said.
“We see in the coroner’s office about a third of those cases because most of them are happening in long-term care facilities, or retirement communities, where people are under doctor’s care,” Pruitt said. “There’s an explanation behind the death, but if you died in a private home, on a roadway or somewhere outside a facility like that, it’s more likely we are going to handle that case.”
As work continues to grow, the 11 employees of the coroner’s office are facing a large obstacle — they don’t have their own central space. The office right now is spread across three locations around the county, which Pruitt says is inefficient.
Autopsies are conducted at Jessen & Keller Funeral Home in Whiteland for a minimal fee, decedents — a person who has died — are stored at Johnson Memorial Hospital’s morgue in Franklin. The coroner’s current offices are in a small space at the Johnson County Courthouse North Annex in downtown Franklin.
Most of the time, employees at the coroner’s office work out of their cars because they are on the go between locations so much, Pruitt said.
The proposed county coroner’s office and health department building planned on Drake Road will change that. By moving all of its business to one central location, the office will have better coordination for administrative work and medical examinations, along with a place to keep decedents, Pruitt said.
“It’d be like having a fire truck where your water is at one place, your hose is in another place and the truck actually sits in a separate building,” he said. “You got to go around and pull them all three together to go get the job done.”
As the county continues to grow, the coroner’s office is will get bigger, so simplifying logistics is a necessity. Right now, the coroner’s office has to pay for a private transportation service to transport decedents from the hospital morgue to the funeral home, and back to the hospital. Having a dedicated space will eliminate that need, Pruitt said.
Additionally, the new facility will allow the office to have all of its evidence storage, documentation and record-keeping close by. The morgue at the new facility will have space to hold up to 10 decedents, seven more than the current space at JMH allows, Pruitt said.
The new building will also provide better security for personal belongings and gives the coroner a private space to meet with families, he said.
“These are just some of the things that, logistics-wise, are going to make our job much easier,” Pruitt said. “Our office is basically all part-time people, so we don’t have somebody in the office 24 hours a day, but bringing us all under one roof is going to make a huge difference and make us much more efficient, to get our job done.”
Sharing the facility with the health department will also make one of both departments’ services easier: death certificates.
The coroner’s office signs death certificates, sometimes in cases where a physician refuses to sign a death certificate. However, the health department is where people go to pick up the certificates after they are signed and processed, Pruitt said.
“We’re going to be right across the hall from them,” he said. “We already interact with them on a regular basis, so it was a nice fit for the health department, and the coroner’s office to be together.”
The new facility will also allow the office to plan for its long-term needs and the needs of the county.
“We’ve tried to look down the road to see what the next 20 or 30 years are going to bring to the office long after I’m out of office,” Pruitt said.
To read more about the shared county building click here.
To read more about the health department office space needs click here.
