Marshall County Coroner John Grolich appeared before the County Commissioners on Monday to seek pre-pay approval for a power-load cart for the coroner’s van. The new cot from Striker is $38,978.88 and will be delivered by the sales rep saving the shipping fee. The fund to purchase the cot will come from the county’s COVID funds. The Commissioners approved the request.
The Coroner spoke briefly about COVID and said, “The COVID situation today is impacting everybody’s life. So far this year I’ve had over 20 deaths from COVID and quite frankly most of those have come after July 1st. The sad thing is, my latest one was Friday evening. While I addressed the needs of that gentleman in the ER, I left the ER and went right to CCU and talked with his wife that is in there in critical care with COVID.”
Grolich told the commissioners, “This really creates a sense of cultural liability in as much as this fight is for everybody. We are all in this together. This is not one agency or one organization fighting this. This is county wide, this is statewide, this is worldwide and it’s not going to go away.” He said one of the best defenses next to the injections is education. He warned the commissioners that there are still folks that are resisting the shots.
The Marshall County Coroner also spoke to the Commissioners about his case lead saying, “We performed our first autopsy on April 27th of this year and since then we have done 21 more. Before our building we would have had to have gone out of county for our autopsies. At one point in time, we did three autopsies in one day. We’ve done two autopsies in the same day multiple times and at one point in time we had four bodies in our cooler and our facility is set up for 10.”
The coroner told the commissioners, so far this year they have done 167 cases. In 2020 they had 132 cases with COVID. In 2019 there were 106 cases and in 2018 only 103 cases. Grolich said this year he has handles 5 suicides, 6 accidental deaths and 6 homicides including an 11-month-old.
