Faced with budget cuts, the Coroner's Office canceled its contract with Rivero a couple of years ago and decided to handle disposal of indigent remains in-house, saving taxpayers roughly $100,000 a year. This also meant rougher undertaking, however. A long-standing rule would now be enforced that indigent corpses would be offered first as cadavers for medical students. The number of relatives of the deceased claiming indigence has since plummeted.
Rivero was awarded $116,040 in an initial jury verdict, but the city appealed and a new trial was ordered. Deputy City Attorney Mark Mosley says the case is expected to be heard again within a year. He notes as well that in August a federal court threw out a suit filed by a forensic toxicologist who claimed he had been sacked by the coroner in 1993 because he had blown the whistle on employees taking gifts from funeral homes. The court was unconvinced, and pointed to the fact that elimination of a forensic toxicologist from the payroll was part of money-saving measures accounted for in the city's 1993-94 budget.
Will there be more suits against the Medical Examiner's Office? "Probably," Mosley says. "Unfortunately. Part of the reason is because the investigators come upon situations where there's a lot of anger and frustration floating around. Some of that anger sticks to them."
The body retrieval has moved with routine swiftness. Hellman and Cecil return to the office at 7:55 and remove their jackets. They aren't supposed to speculate ahead of an autopsy as to cause of death, but Hellman feels sure enough about this case to offer the following scenario: "He got up from the bed feeling like hell, dropped the glass, fell against the table and collapsed to the floor. Heart disease. Cardiac arrest."
The investigators transfer Masaharu's body to a gurney and wheel him inside and onto a large scale. The body weighs 130 pounds.
They next unwrap the body and toss the white sheet into a laundry bin. Cecil takes Masaharu's measure with a long pole. The body is 5 feet 6 inches long.
Both men undress the body and wrap it in a fresh sheet. Cecil proceeds to take fingerprints. Hellman steps outside for a cigarette. I follow behind, and we stand together for a few minutes without speaking. I'm feeling disoriented from having breezed into a stranger's life at such a profound moment, a minor character in someone else's movie. I barely know Kimiko Shimada, and I'll never see her again, and yet I have shared one of the deepest and most formative experiences of her entire life.
Hellman sees the troubled expression on my face. "You OK?" he asks.
I nod and compliment him on how he handled everything back there.
"It's hard sometimes," Hellman replies. "People don't like to think about what happens next."
"Are you afraid of dying?" I ask.
Hellman considers for a moment. "I am afraid of dying," he admits. "It's not like any of us here love death. We have to deal with gory scenes, kids being killed ...." His voice trails off as the memories flit through his head.
"It's a job," Hellman concludes, falling back on a timeworn rationalization. "Someone has to do it."
Masaharu won't be operated on until the morning. He's placed in a big freezer along with six or seven other bodies. The freezer is kept at a steady 34 degrees.
I trail Hellman and Cecil back to the front office and we return to the seats we occupied prior to Masaharu's demise. There's not much to say. I can see that the investigators are keeping an eye on me, trying to deduce what I make of it all.
"Listen," I say, "I think I'll head home."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"OK," Hellman says, not displeased with the news.
"I think I've seen enough for one night."
"Uh-huh."
"Thanks for letting me tag along."
"Thanks for coming."
Hellman's eating a late dinner. We shake hands and I head for the door. As I go I can hear from the back room the sound of a football game being switched on.
David Lazarus is managing editor of the East Bay Business Journal.
