Bad-news messenger makes his last call

As a young man, Vernon McCarty thought he’d become a minister. He never imagined a career in death.

As Washoe County coroner for nearly 28 years, the soft-spoken messenger of bad news has witnessed countless tragedies. Some unfolded publicly in bold headlines. Most involved the quiet suffering of bereaved families.

Throughout, he says he has tried to rely on a commitment to truth and dignity in death, for the deceased and those they leave behind.

McCarty, who retired April 13, figures he has signed his name on roughly 30,000 death certificates -- the final stamp on the life of someone on the way to the hereafter.

“The hard part is knowing that the family has gone through the initial grief of this, and now they’re going to come home and receive this thing in the mail, which is going to reopen the wound that’s just starting to heal,” McCarty said.

With his retirement, Washoe County is converting the coroner’s office to that of a medical examiner with a physician in charge. McCarty, who is not a doctor, recommended the change and helped in the transition.

“It places a medical doctor in the position of being the ultimate decision-maker, which is valid,” McCarty said.

A reserved man with a friendly smile and background in law enforcement, McCarty is reluctant to talk about himself and even more so of those he’s tended.

“From my perspective, it is almost impossible to comment regarding deaths without the remarks coming off at the expense of bereaved families,” McCarty said when asked for an interview.

“These people are the most in need of our compassion, as well as their own privacy, when the topic of death is before the public eye,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Associated Press.

When it’s suicide

Being “the messenger” of some of the worst news anyone will ever hear is never easy, he said.

“You have to answer the questions, you have to seek the justice and sometimes you have to be brutal with the truth,” he said recently in his office at the county morgue.

“I never write my name on a death certificate adjacent to the word ‘suicide’ without knowing I’m going to get yelled at,” he said. “It creates a tremendous pain in the family.”

But the truth, he said, is necessary.

“We can’t get at the issue of suicide if we don’t correctly identify it,” he said.

He’s not ashamed of the tears he’s cried, “routinely, in private.”

Sometimes, they still come years later.

His eyes well and his voice cracks when he describes the death of a small boy 30 years ago in New Mexico.

“The child was simply watching dump trucks at a mine dump, and a huge boulder rolled down over him,” he said, wiping his eyes and pausing to compose himself. “To this day I feel hopeless about that case.”

But amid the despair, there are rewards.

One of his first cases after coming to Reno in 1979 involved the death of an infant who was strangled by a mobile hung above a crib.

“It was a stuffed elephant with the body and ears suspended by elastic bands,” he recalled. “The baby just stretched the bands, got it entangled around its neck.”

Immediate calls to federal authorities led to the recall of 470,000 of the imported mobiles.

One other child died during the recall, but McCarty takes solace in the untold number of infant deaths prevented.

“There’s just no end to the incidents in which death becomes the catalyst to create change,” he said. “And you have to embrace that.”

Career change

McCarty, 61, grew up in New Mexico and attended Westminster College in Salt Lake City, majoring in political science with minors in religion and public speaking.

“I was actually going to be a Methodist minister,” he said.

An exchange with an old country doctor back home altered his path. The doctor encouraged him to observe an autopsy.

“I went to the state medical examiner’s office while I was going to college,” McCarty said. The pathologist let him watch three autopsies in one day.

When he graduated in 1970, McCarty returned to New Mexico and, at age 24, was elected sheriff of sprawling Catron County.

“I found this huge void. There was no training for law enforcement,” he said. He paid his way to attend a homicide course on his own time because county officials “didn’t see the need.”

“I became extremely fascinated with the concept of what medical science can add to an investigation.”

Quickly tiring of politics, he didn’t seek reelection when his two-year term expired.

Around that time, New Mexico abolished its local coroner system in favor of a statewide medical examiner’s office. He was hired as chief investigator and charged with setting up protocols and teams for field investigations.

From there he moved to northern Nevada, where the county coroner’s office in Reno handles or assists in unexpected, unnatural and unattended death investigations for 15 of Nevada’s 17 counties, as well as four counties in eastern California and a portion of another.

“Vern took the office from being a backward, old-town operation into what it is now, with very dedicated and trained people,” said Justice of the Peace Edward Dannan, who was a deputy district attorney representing the coroner’s office when McCarty was hired.

McCarty’s early months in Reno were anything but easy.

He was criticized by the local media when he sought to update county ordinances on the powers and duties of the coroner’s office, including restricting what information was considered public.

“His main thing was that death be handled in a professional way,” Dannan said.

It’s one thing, Dannan said, to release that someone died of suicide. What McCarty was concerned about, and what was ultimately adopted, were restrictions on the general release of gory details that could embarrass and bring added pain to survivors.

“He just felt that even in death, there is some right to privacy,” Dannan said.

McCarty, he said, also helped orchestrate multi-agency disaster planning.

“Before, no one was ready for what was going to happen,” Dannan said.

That planning was put to the test when Galaxy Flight 203 carrying 65 passengers and six crew members on a Super Bowl and gambling junket from Minnesota crashed on takeoff from the Reno airport Jan. 21, 1985.

One person survived.

Using a grid pattern, authorities logged the entire debris field, noting where bodies and personal effects were found.

The Galaxy crash, McCarty said, was a first in which complete autopsies and toxicology tests were conducted on every victim and findings were correlated with the crash scene.

Medical examinations found many of those aboard had survived the initial crash but died of fire, smoke inhalation and toxic fumes.

McCarty said the methodical investigation helped spur new commercial airline safety standards, such as requiring seat coverings to be made of slow-burning materials and lighted markings on or near the cabin floor to allow passengers to remain below toxic fumes while navigating their escape.

“If you’re talking about motivations, those are the reasons you do this work,” he said.

Cause of death

About one-third of the coroner’s caseload involves sorting out contributing death factors, which affect insurance and estate settlements.

“Many times, the homicide case, the gunshot wound, is pretty obvious,” McCarty said. “A tough case is somebody who was injured somehow, goes into a hospital, develops an infection after that, has a preexisting disease, and you’re trying to sort out how all this contributes to their death.

“Those cases never become media concerns, but we end up looking at all of those.”

Washoe County Dist. Atty. Dick Gammick said McCarty was a stickler for details and professionalism.

“Vern is very quiet, very focused, and extremely knowledgeable to the point of being pigheaded sometimes,” he said. “The man really knows his stuff.”

He also has a sense of humor.

Gammick recalled years ago when department heads would occasionally serve breakfast for employees who had a certain number of years of county service.

“Vern would show up in a surgical mask, dressed in his whole garb” worn in the autopsy room, Gammick said.

These days, McCarty’s looking forward to solitude, spending more time in high mountains, traveling and big-game hunting.

“I’ve walked in the valley of death long enough,” he said. “I’m going to walk on the ridge for a while.”