Muscogee Coroner forced to use U-Haul to transport bodies, blames outdated equipment

The morgue on Beaver Run Road in Columbus has been there as long as Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan has been alive, he says.

The 73-year-old called the morgue “antiquated” and says it remains at full capacity on a daily basis.

The morgue is located around the back of the West police precinct. A concrete block building with school cafeteria orange tile floors.

The main room is roughly the size of a living room with a stainless steel autopsy table in the middle of the room that hasn’t been used since Don Kilgore’s tenure in the 1980s.

The larger cooler lies to the right of the table and the smaller cooler is on the back wall.

The larger cooler the department has can hold six bodies, and he says he had to refurbish another cooler that holds two bodies in order to deal with the overload.

The smaller of the two coolers was made in 1967 by the Lipshaw compay and has now outlived the company which went out of business, according to Deputy Coroner Ben Saxon.

Then there’s the transport van.

“Our van’s got over 300,000 miles on it. It’s antiquated. It’s constantly down at the shop,” said Bryan. “It’s dangerous to drive back and forth to Atlanta on a regular basis that we do.” Atlanta is where autopsies are performed.

The van is over a decade old now and is now almost unusable with how often it stays in the shop.

At one point a few weeks ago Bryan rented a U-Haul in order to transport six bodies to Atlanta due to an overcrowding at the county morgue and the van being in the shop again.

Bryan said he along with three deputies and a forensic driver met at the morgue at 4:30 a.m. in order to get the bodies into the U-Haul and up to Atlanta before decomposition began.

“We gotta do the best we can,” Bryan said.

Shortly after interviewing Bryan, the coroner’s office had to once again employ the use of a U-Haul van to transport bodies to Atlanta as their van was in the shop again.

Another problem Bryan is facing is long wait times in order for a table to open up for autopsy at the GBI’s crime lab in Atlanta. He said that in some cases he’s had to wait nearly two weeks to transport a body to the crime lab.

All the while the families have to wait for their loved one’s to return so they can bury them and pay their final respects.

This can also affects these families ability to finalize legal matters regarding their lost loved one.

What’s causing this overload?

Bryan said they house the bodies of homicide victims, pauper deaths, suicide deaths and accidental deaths. However, the Muscogee County morgue is also having to house the bodies of three neighboring counties that don’t have a cooler or transportation.

Talbot, Stewart and Chattahoochee counties account for approximately eight bodies per month.

However, that is just the tip of the iceberg as the coroner’s office processes approximately 1250 bodies per year, according to Bryan.

“And then when you look at the homicide rate that we’ve got going and the pauper rate that we got going; I mean it’s just a steady flow in and out,” Bryan said.

“But since I’ve been here, I’ve had five instances where this cooler’s been full,” Saxon said. He’s been with the coroner’s office since August of last year.

“We’re getting two to three calls a day sometimes,” Saxon said. “We handle a lot more than just homicide, but the uptick in homicides has not helped us as far as being able to plan how we’re going to handle things.”

On the day Bryan was interviewed he said he had four death calls. With four coroners in the department including himself the high death tolls can cause a heavy workload on all the coroners.

“None of us have a life,” Bryan said.

Muscogee County has seen a spike in homicides this year with a total of 14 homicides occurring this year, according to a count kept by the Ledger-Enquirer.

In February, there was a triple homicide at a local Motel 6 on Victory Drive and a double homicide Tuesday on Clay street. At one point there were five homicides within the city over a three-day period.

On top of homicides, the coroner’s office has also been called out for skeletal remains found in Columbus near Corporate Ridge Parkway on March 9 and a body near Fifth Avenue Sunday.

What can fix this?

Bryan said he’ll be going before the budget committee on March 21 to request a new transport van and two new stretchers that are old and “inadequate.” He said the coroner’s office is seeing more morbidly obese people that exceed the suggested weight limit for their stretchers.

Bryan said it would take some money to expand the morgue, but he estimates that the remodeling would probably take less than $5,000.

“If he’s got a van that he can’t keep on the road, I can’t imagine that we wouldn’t look at replacing that,” said Mayor Skip Henderson. “He’s gotta be able to do his job. It doesn’t sound like he can with the current vehicle.”

Columbus City Manager Isaiah Hugley agreed with the mayor.

“If the need for a new transport van is an immediate emergency for the coroner’s office and the coroner makes that immediate emergency known, his request will be considered now as an emergency purchase situation,” Hugley said in a statement.

This story was originally published March 14, 2023 at 5:00 AM.