CAPE CORONER STARTS FROM SCRATCH; LACK OF STORAGE SPACE HAMPERS HURST

JACKSON, Mo. -- Cape Girardeau County Coroner Mike Hurst doesn't have an office, a vehicle to transport bodies or even a county morgue.

Just storing evidence is a major challenge for the newly appointed coroner. Late Thursday afternoon, he donned blue rubber gloves and loaded a tall cardboard box of blood and urine samples, evidence from past death cases, into his brown pickup truck.

Hurst moved the evidence from the late coroner John Carpenter's mortuary service in Jackson to his Cape Girardeau home. Hurst said he had no other place to store it.

"I have nothing to work with right now," said Hurst, who doesn't have a file cabinet or a fax machine.

Gov. Roger Wilson last week appointed Hurst, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for public administrator, to fill Carpenter's unexpired term.

Hurst told the county commission he'll have to rely on a local mortuary service and funeral homes to haul bodies at a cost to the county. That cost is unknown at this point.

He plans to rely on Cape Girardeau's two hospitals, which have offered free morgue space but only as long as bodies aren't stored for more than 24 hours.

St. Francis Medical Center can hold three bodies while Southeast Missouri Hospital has room for six, Hurst said.

But county officials said even the hospitals won't take some bodies. "If you have a floater or burn victim, they won't take them," said Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones.

"As of right this minute, there is no place we can take them," Jones said.

Based on past history, Hurst said he expects to investigate about 120 deaths a year. The coroner deals with everything from natural deaths to homicides, suicides and traffic fatalities.

The county likely will have to rely on Carpenter's Mortuary Service in Jackson to haul many of the bodies.

Carpenter operated the mortuary service and served as coroner for a dozen years before his death last month from colon cancer.

Roger Moore continues to operate the embalming business. "We are all going to work together," Moore said.

Carpenter handled his coroner duties through his mortuary business, never charging the county for the every day expenses of processing death. He transported bodies at no cost to the county. The county never furnished him an office, he didn't need one.

Hurst said the mortuary service would charge $250 to transport a body. There would be added charges to transport bodies to Farmington, Mo., or St. Louis for autopsies.

He doesn't know just how much the county would end up spending on transportation costs alone.

Hurst said the families of the deceased typically foot the bill for the transportation of bodies in natural death cases. But the county would have to pay such costs in the case of murders, he said.

County Auditor H. Weldon Macke has budgeted $56,753 for the coroner's office this year, about $12,000 more than last year.

But Macke admits it's a guess at best. "Carpenter kind of ran his own show," said Macke. "We never did ever have to fret with it and now we do."