December 4, 2024

cjstudents

News for criminal justice students

Kentucky coroners struggle amid minimal salaries and county budgets

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Coroner Corey Watson spent four days and four nights at his office in late July after historic flooding ravaged Knott County, killing 16 people.

He’d known at least one of the victims his whole life. His office’s three-person morgue wasn’t nearly big enough. When a nearby coroner in Eastern Kentucky loaned him a four-person mortuary cooler, people twice tried to steal the generator keeping it cold.

And after retrieving and identifying the dead, it was Watson who was tasked with notifying their families.

His pay over those four nights: about $9.81 an hour.

The historic flooding made his already strenuous job far more difficult, though the lack of resources he’d been given ahead of time left Watson still reeling three weeks later.

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