Muted Colors, Witty Asides, Ghastly Work:
A Day at the Coroner's Office

OAKLAND -- With its muted colors and cozy chairs, the lobby of the Coroner?s Office on Washington Street in downtown Oakland is as unassuming as the waiting room of a doctor?s office. It is hard to imagine that just one floor below the office of the bubbly front desk receptionist lay the pulverized bodies of Oakland?s latest homicide victims.

It is equally difficult to imagine that Deputy Coroner Lt. Dave Hoig and Assistant Sheriff Robert Maginnis, with their dignified suits, salt-and-pepper hair and gold jewelry, come face-to-face with the battered and mutilated bodies of murder victims every day.

"It?s a gory job, but it?s fascinating," said Maginnis, a Cal School of Criminology graduate and a 13-year veteran with a round, placid face and small, unaffected blue eyes that seem to have registered too much carnage to be surprised by much.

Both Hoig and Maginnis have personally beheld some of the most gruesome and intriguing crime scenes in the city of Oakland.

The cops, who are firsthand witnesses to the final repose of Oakland?s homicides, deem the current fixation on murder in Oakland largely a "media-driven farce," a sensationalistic obsession that prompts the news media to "count murders like boxcars on a train," in Maginnis? words. The cops argue the city?s murder rate is within cyclical bounds and that the press? obsession with numbers trivializes the lives lost, and makes the public wrongly believe that violence is far more prevalent here this year than previous ones. That insist this is not the case.

They are both advocates of gun control. "The forefathers didn?t know about AK-47s," said Hoig.

They also talk about death with the sort of detachedness with which one discusses the weather and occasionally they laugh about it. "To do this job you?ve got to be able to laugh at everything," said Hoig.

The job? To determine the cause of death in cases in which the cause is not clear, and in which a crime is connected. Each year the office examines more than 4,000 such cases.

Maginnis and Hoig provided a tour of the facilities, pausing to explain the function of the Deputy Public Administrator, a tall, cheery, freckle-faced woman named Joyce Amason. According to Maginnis, if Amason is unable to find the deceased?s next of kin -- as is often the case with homeless victims -- the body is kept with the Coroner?s office for further investigation and finally given a "proper burial" in a Potter?s Field located behind Highland Hospital.

They lead us down to the main attraction of the Coroner?s office: two conjoined rooms aptly named "The Cut Room.? This is where the bodies of victims are transported so that forensic pathologists can perform an autopsy, a process during which the victim?s sternum is pried open with an instrument that resembles a pair of large, primitive garden shears.

The room is stark, sterilized and appropriately grim, with a gray and white motif that is interrupted only by sickly green tiling along the walls and floors. A whiteboard screaming "GOOD MORNING" in flamboyant, multicolored marker poses a sharp contrast to the cold, metal gurneys upon which the deceased are strapped during the autopsy, chest open, organs exposed.

This morning the most recent Oakland homicide victim was just examined? a 48-year old West Oakland man named Freddie Pearson, who was shot in the head last night as he drove to work. Maginnis offered us a quick glimpse into an enormous, stainless steel refrigerator where the bodies of Pearson and five other victims lay, swathed in starched, white sheets, the profile of heads and toes clearly visible in the chilly dark.

According to Maginnis, the refrigerators have accommodated as many as 22 bodies at once, but on average, house anywhere from 8-10 bodies.

The cut room is lined with what appear to be mini-fridges, but are actually called Safe-Dry units and are used to store and keep dry the deceased?s clothing, so as to prevent the formation of mold. Freddie Pearson?s clothing have been stored in the Safe-Dry unit, including a blood-drenched Fat Albert t-shirt, which indicates, according to Maginnis, that the victim was shot on his left side.