BETTER THAN HEARSAY - When Death We Do Part

CATSKILL - It is pure conjecture whether human beings care or not about which coroner handles our body, if necessary, when we become corpses.

I realize it is probably a seldom-if-ever discussed topic but I feel a little like an expert on the subject since my mother died at home.

Her name is Dorothy. She passed away in the wee hours of a summer morning in 2001 after a night of dancing at a local resort.

My sister found her and called me so I went to the house, having no idea what to do. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events.

At some point, though, there were two state troopers and a Greene County coroner on the scene, making sure there was no foul play.

It was an unattended death so they were just doing their jobs. I stayed with her until the undertaker came and we moved her out of her bedroom.

There was an unexpected and lasting sense of resolution, carefully carrying her down a narrow stairway into the hearse and off my mother went.

Things didn’t go quite that smoothly when a person passed away in the town of Prattsville, in mid-January, ultimately resulting in the county legislature changing the way coroners do their duty.

The story, as I hear it, is that the person passed sometime after midnight and a coroner didn’t arrive for three hours which is a long, long time.

There are four coroners in the county, geographically split between the valley and the mountaintop. It is an elected position.

Reportedly, neither of the two mountaintop-based coroners, Hassan Basagic nor Daniel Gulino, were called to go to Prattsville.

Instead, the call from the state police went to Gerard Buckley, based in Cairo. Basagic is in Hunter and Gulino is in Windham.

The lengthy delay in arriving, and the fact that the body was transported by Buckley to Gulino, caused a stir, prompting the legislature to take unprecedented action at a workshop, last week.

Lawmakers decided that, as of February 1, specificity would be written into how coroners are dispatched and by whom.

It is tricky ground since the coroners are voted into office. The legislature doesn’t want to tread on the sanctity of how they conduct business.

“They don’t have a boss,” legislature chairman Patrick Linger said in a phone interview. “But we control policy and the purse strings.

“We have gone to the coroners in the past. There has never been a policy in place,” Linger said, meaning who gets called and by whom.

It has generally been assumed a gentlemen’s agreement was in place, using a round robin system to summon a coroner, although nothing is etched in stone or even drawn in the sand.

“They don’t necessarily have geographies that they cover,” Linger said. “They aren’t designated for certain quadrants of the county.

“The state police are comfortable calling Mr. Buckley. That’s not a problem necessarily. He is usually able to drop what he is doing and go.

“But that doesn’t leave any record-keeping,” Linger said. “From now on, if a coroner is not called by the county 911 dispatcher, they will not get paid.

“The state police will be advised that calls have to go through the county dispatcher. This came to a head in Prattsville. If there is a complaint like this in the future, we will have records.”

No favoritism has been intimated and neither Basagic nor Gulino, who also run funeral homes, are voicing dissatisfaction over the matter.

“There seems to have been a miscommunication this time,” Gulino said in a phone interview. “There isn’t any bad blood between anyone. We are all on the same page, doing the right thing for people.”

“I’ve got no complaints,” said Basagic, who has been a coroner for 50 years. “Sometimes I’m not able to go cross-county but I’ve let them know [at the 911 Center] that I’m available unless I’m busy with a funeral.”

The hearsay is the coroners have better knowledge than anyone else about why Buckley got the Prattsville call and their own internal operations and if there is an unwritten chain of command and who is available when.

It’s much simpler for lawmakers. “Maybe, at 2 a.m.,” Linger said, “you might not get a coroner to answer the phone right away. And the county has had three new coroners within the past two years.

“But this is most importantly about a service being provided and getting someone to a call, respectfully taking care of that person’s body.

“The official policy, done administratively, now is that all law enforcement agencies seeking coroners must go through the 911 system.

“An underlying issue is parity. There will be a rotating list of who gets called. The 911 Center will keep records. There will be checks and balances,” Linger said.