Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner
The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner is the medical examiner's office of the government of the County of Los Angeles, California. It is located at the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Established in its current form on December 17, 1920, by an ordinance approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the office has a history dating back to the appointment of the first county coroner in 1850. The LACDME was previously known as both the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner and the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner.
List of chief medical examiners
The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner recognized the following individuals as its leaders in the agency's history.Recent chief medical examiners
Mark A. Fajardo
On July 9, 2010, the Board of Supervisors approved the appointment of Mark A. Fajardo, the Chief Forensic Pathologist at Riverside County, as the Medical Examiner-Coroner, at an annual salary of $275,000. He formally replaced Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, who served 2 years as the Coroner, in August 2013.Mark Fajardo resigned in March 2016. A news report indicated that "he left because it became common to have up to 50 bodies waiting to be processed and the backlog of bodies was 'nuts'.... and toxicology tests were taking six months to complete" due to inadequate staffing. Fajardo's predecessor, Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, was re-appointed on an interim basis on April 11, 2016.