
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 31, 1990                   TAG: 9005310487
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LEND ROANOKE MORGUE A HAND

OUR SOCIETY is fortunate there are people able and willing to do the unpleasant jobs that need doing. One of those is examining dead bodies and performing autopsies in cases of violent or suspicious deaths, so that the courts can in turn do their job.

Most citizens wouldn't want to work with or around corpses - not even to help crack down on crime. When society has people willing to do such jobs on its behalf, it ought to provide them an adequate working environment. The Commonwealth of Virginia - that's not some disembodied entity off in Richmond, it's all of us - is not doing that for its medical examiners in the Western Region.

In a story this week, staff writer Victoria Ratcliff described the working conditions in Roanoke of the region's two medical examiners and of forensic scientists at the state crime laboratory. Those conditions are abominable.

State employees try to perform their assigned tasks in crowded quarters, using outmoded equipment. There's hardly room sometimes at the morgue for the bodies. Morgue and lab are near each other but in different buildings, so blood and tissue samples have to be moved from one place to another, sometimes in bad weather.

Quarters for morgue and lab are old and need maintenance. Federal authorities once shut down firearms examiner Bill Conrad's firing range on the lab premises because faulty ventilation allowed lead from the fired bullets to accumulate to hazardous levels.

Conrad says he is working 4-month-old cases now and "we don't do all the cases out there. We're not offering all the services we could be doing." The same is true for the serology lab. For example, it lacks space to do DNA analysis, which Dr. Paul Ferrara, state director of forensic science, describes as "probably the most important technology in forensic science since fingerprints." The bad working conditions also make it difficult to hire replacements when there are job vacancies.

There's land for a new building to house both morgue and forensics lab: The Roanoke County Board of Supervisors agreed to donate it in 1987. A planning study was done for the new building in 1988. Plans for a $16 million structure were drawn in 1989. The hope was that the General Assembly would include funds in this year's budget to allow construction to begin. It didn't, and it appears that the project is far down on the state's priority list.

The state has many capital-improvement needs, and - given the present fiscal picture - several of them may rightly rank higher than new quarters for a morgue and crime lab for the Western Region. Still, a society gets about as much government services as it is willing to pay for. As long as the dirty work is out of sight, it's more likely to remain out of mind - and beyond the pocketbook.

by CNB