After a stint in the Air Force as a B-52 tail gunner and time spent with the Contra Costa County Sheriff's and Stockton Police departments, Gregory Wyatt has been Sacramento County's coroner since 2008.

Wyatt, 47, who joined the Coroner's Office as a deputy investigator in 1998, now heads an agency responsible for overseeing about 3,700 death investigations annually, including 1,000 autopsies.

This week, Wyatt explained how his agency functions:

>What are the basic duties of the coroner?

We're responsible for three things: We identify the decedent, that's our primary responsibility, and notify the next of kin in a timely manner.

The second priority is to return property belonging to the decedent to the legal next of kin, so we actually are responsible for everything on the body at the time of death, whether it's money or phones, anything they carry in their pocket or on their body, all the way to where we're responsible for multimillion-dollar homes that they own.

Our third priority is the one that the public is the most aware of, which is to determine the cause of death.

>Of the 20,000 county deaths annually, which cases come to the Coroner's Office?

The things we're not responsible for are natural deaths that occur in a medical facility under a physician's care or outside of a medical facility under a physician's care, i.e., a hospice patient.

Last year we had a little more than 8,000 reported deaths, and out of the 8,000 cases reported to us we actually physically investigated about 3,700. We autopsied approximately 1,000 of those cases.

>What are the most difficult cases to investigate?

Suicides are the most difficult cases we investigate. They're also the most emotional. You can imagine the grief that a family member goes through when a loved one takes their life.

They're difficult to investigate because, unlike Hollywood, most people don't leave suicide notes. It's not like in the movies where you have this nice, neat note that explains they have actually taken their life. It's more shoe leather, looking at what was going on at the time of death, what was going on weeks before, talking to family, talking to friends.

>How long can an autopsy take?

The average autopsy is probably two hours, but I've seen autopsies that have lasted three days. One case that comes to mind that I'll never forget is (blues guitarist) Elvin Bishop's daughter (who was killed and dismembered along with another couple during a five-victim killing spree in 2000).

I remember coming into the morgue and the picture in my mind of the pathologist on a ladder. We had body parts laid out on a tarp and the doctor was visually trying to say that that leg goes with that torso and the arm goes with this torso, trying to piece these bodies back together. Those took multiple days to do one autopsy on one victim.

>What are the challenges of high-profile cases like Tyrone Smith, who died in custody after his arrest in the shooting of a Twin Rivers Unified School District police officer? (Wyatt's office concluded that pre-existing medical conditions and physical exertion from his arrest likely led to Smith's death.)

We recognized immediately that was going to be a high-profile case and there would be a need for the public to know what had occurred so that they could have confidence in the law enforcement agencies involved.

We also realized that that Police Department deserved an answer as quickly as possible. The chips fall where they may.

I think it was about 30 days later that we had a cause of death out. Right now, we're running four to five months behind because we're doing 1,000 cases with two doctors. Our doctors can't close a case until they're sitting at their desk analyzing results and determining what the cause of death is based on the facts before them.

>Why are bodies stacked in sheets on racks in your agency rather than inside drawers as depicted on TV shows?

I've seen them in the movies, but I've never seen a drawer in real life. I've not seen one episode of "CSI." I get that question all the time.

Never watched one episode, but I know they solve stuff in an hour that takes us a couple of minutes longer.

But they've created quite an interest in this profession. I think I've got some young folks who are deputy coroners that probably started on the very beginning of "CSI" episodes in high school.

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