Meeting of February 22, 2022

foreign good afternoon welcome to the february 22nd meeting of hardin county fiscal court i remind you this is a voting meeting if you have cell phones to please turn them off or put them in vibrate mode we'll begin with the roll call if you would miss donald clam here wiseman here thompson here ronnie goodman here king here judge barry here easter here doug goodman here williams here mr thompson will lead us to invocation and miss williams in the pledge if you'll please stand i invite you to join me in prayer father god we we just praise you today with the acknowledgement that you're in control of all things we thank you father for that that you know us individually and that you provide for us through all circumstance lord we've had many circumstances of light that cause us to feel a little unnerved as humans the lord we know we place our trust in our faith in jesus christ and have a relationship with you because of that we can take faith and hope

in the truth of your triumph and our time of challenge but we thank you for then all for you and that all things you do have authority and you do triumph and we have no reason to fear once we place our faith in you we thank you for that father we pray that you would guide our hearts guide our minds guide our thoughts as we consider the business of hardin county today and help us to make the informed decisions that we can to do the very best we can for our community with the resources that you grant us we pray this in jesus name amen amen please join me in the pledge i pledge [Music] allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all we'll start with department and elected office reports and first up is the hardin county coroner dr lee judge

got the yearly report for you today if you have copies before you apparently got the button there of course first slide showing the breakdown of the categories of deaths that what we call a manner of death accident homicide natural suicide and then the undetermined but you see accidents 81 cases for the calendar year and uh total cases as you see at the top 1200 89 the highest we've had and actually looks like we're going to break that one part of this year over february almost got 300 cases for this almost two months unbelievable but the 13 homicides last year and the naturals as you know are our biggest category over 1123 suicides and four undetermined and still judgment being made on some drug situations whether it was accidental or suicide or for what have you so it'll be hopefully decided in the next month or two and the next slide is just pie chart showing those same percentages i mean the blue colors natural discs takes up most of our case load

next slide will be the breaking down those categories again accidents breaking them down as to the cause of death and the accidental death and see over 55 percent of the overdoses it's unbelievable but back in the early days accidents was up pretty high now just a lot of accidental deaths i still don't understand how that happens like it does but folks overdose all the time and then the 30 category it's uh i see i think that's supposed to be other and i'm not sure just kind of overview i could look that up for you later i don't know that an exact breakdown right off but uh it was an mvc remote vehicle cutting that collisions i guess that's the thirty percent i'm sorry so car this still happened unfortunately next slide the pie chart showing the homicides and most of them gunshots as you see and then the blunt force injuries is where they're beat up in 13 cases for 2021. next slide on the suicides and you saw the total i'll go 23. and

surprisingly the hanging is pretty high the gunshot is the majority of you see 35 of those suicides are by gunshot and it overdosed the acnes and a couple of carbon monoxides and follow next slide um i guess shane has made a new slide for us the demographics on the suicides i get a lot of questions about suicidal deaths nowadays and see the category i say between 30 years of age and 50 would be that you had those two categories it's on 12 and seems to be the biggest category in the race caucasians 21 and then gender males are taking their own life more than females next side kind of breaking down the drug related deaths and by the years the year to date and uh january 1 through december 31 i had 50 this past year and you see the earlier years 2017 it was only 21s those numbers just keep on going up and it's hitting pretty hard already

this year these first two months next slide getting on the drug category the most commonly used drugs for in-depth and vegetation the myth is high it's morphe and the fentanyl actually is the second highest and then a lot of the prescription drugs are down the lower list as far as the abuse that we see those last two listed across the bottom the 4am pp and then the para floral fentanyl kind of synthetic drugs and some of the folks that deal with this are getting impurities mixed in with those and it's folks buy them or get them from the friends they don't really know what they're getting so it's the impurities a lot of time for the killer next slide in demographics on the drugs you see the age breakdown race gender and the residents in hardin county and the three neighboring counties meet marion and nelson so you may want to just get some of those statistics just help yourself looking forward to studying them and then

the next slide the last one i think related to drugs with today's report you see the lines going across the bottom horizontally that's in the fentanyl and myth the biggest numbers that we have to deal with i guess again the patch art those of you like pictures fentanyl and meth those two larger categories oxycodone hydrocodones are prescript subscriptions written a lot of time for pain as you all know surgery cases or whatever and we see quite a few of those as far as prescription drugs next slide is comparing the years total cases getting our total this year or this past year 1289 this truck goes back to 2014 16 so about doubled in how many years is that just a few years so it's amazing and the next slide you've heard me say this it's almost too busy a slide to show up here and all kinds of things that shows starting on the left the number of autopsies over the last four years and then the cuithos i think we had one

this past year we've had a high of eight what was that about three years ago maybe middle section the biggest number of charts there is the 652 on the cremations and that continues to increase each year and just cost the funerals and people's desires and so forth 652 that's a lot and of course the corner has to in kentucky we have to sign the provisional report of death it's called that shows that we have analyzed what the cause of death is and funeral homes can't have someone cremated without that signature from the coroner's office so it involves a lot of study and a little more time for making those decisions on the it's a legitimate legitimate death or some foul play or whatever and then they had three categories of smaller categories to the right indigent cases went down from four years ago in the last two categories you've heard me speak to these in regards to transporting the deceased ems you see there about four years ago they 33 and now they're down to 15 about half what