Meeting of June 28, 2022

welcome to the june 28th meeting of hardin county fiscal court i'd remind you this is a voting meeting if you have cell phones then please turn them off or put them in the vibrate mode we'll begin with a roll call if you would miss dolly williams here cleo wiseman here thompson here ronnie goodman here king here judge barry here easter here doug goodman here mr clem will lead us in the invocation and uh mr king and pledge if you please stand please pray with me our most gracious and loving heavenly father we indeed thank you for this beautiful day that that you've given to us father we thank you for life and the many blessings of it father we we pray for those that are standing guard both near and far and father be with their families in their absence if i'll go with us through this meeting lead guide and direct us in all the things we say and do these things i ask in your son jesus name amen amen could you please join me in the pledge i pledge states of allegiance and to the requirement for which it stands

one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all we'll start with department and elected office reports today first up is the corner mr billy afternoon judge and members of court have our bi-monthly corner report for you today robin's pushing the buttons aren't you okay start off with april i had the total of 89 cases as you see and uh five of the 89 were accidental deaths that and just so happens that month all five were drug related and you see the breakdown of the drugs in there that four amp you see is a synthetic uh drug and it's uh that wasn't discovered so i did a little research on that 2018 when that was discovered so just a few years ago

but it's in uh mixed in with a lot of the fentanyl and different things the impurities and so forth are mixed and killing a lot of people but one homicide our first homicide of the year in fact our only one so far and uh we usually have more than that by april so two suicides and get one undetermined which usually means the autopsy results are not uh back to us from a death earlier so 80 with 89 were natural deaths become a common situation next month may at the 91 cases and there were six accidental deaths four again involving drugs and the other two involving autos and 85 of the 91 natural deaths and fentanyl seems to be pretty popular and our number one killer drugs and in this next slide i guess one of one of my favorites it just shows a progressive increase in cases going back to 2018 you see each number gets a little bit higher every year and again this is year to date so that means through the end of may is what these numbers are we're on the calendar year

and 517 cases thus far are still what six paper wise were still seven months ago june and then remaining six months of the calendar year two so seven more months to report to you and i'm sure we'll be over well this year this past year we were over 1200 cases so we're probably up over 1300 but but anyway 5 17 through the last of may i like where you kind of keep that in mind because the next slide is gonna be kind of surprising to me when you go ahead and get that one robin it's the manner of death now this this slide excludes the natural death it's the three categories that seem to get all the notoriety the accident this is the homicides and the suicides if you look on those bar graphs this year 27 cases last year we had 26 and again that's through the end of may and then you look at the homicides look what happened here uh last year we had five at this stage and only one for this year and then the suicides this time last year we had ten of those and this year five of course another six or seven months and you can still catch up i hope we don't but these

numbers really caught my attention when i looked at those when i when i saw the previous slides showing the steady bigger numbers but these non-natural deaths i'm glad to see those numbers low it doesn't hurt my feelings at all next slide you've heard me say is a busy slide it talks about autopsies and bequeathals cremations county cremations which is essentially the indigent deaths and then transport ems transport versus corner transport um interesting that the first column the autopsies at the other side there i'm sorry okay [Music] autopsies last year this time we had 13 autopsies and uh this year eight um bequeathals one

which has kind of been the norm lately cremations you've heard me say they continued to climb and 261 of those through the end of may versus 247 same time last year and then the transport we've talked about ems transport versus coroner transport and when the ems gets a call from i guess mike's department calls the 911 calls ems out to the scene they get there and then if there's a situation where they can't resuscitate the patient then everything stops and the coroner's office is called so in the past they did a lot of the transport where we had to transport back to the corner office and now if it's a natural death and the funeral home can come direct then we go and release the ems right away if we can but now with the corner you guys helped me on that truck a few years ago i appreciate that and so we're able to eliminate the ems from having to hang around as long once we determine when we get to the scene then we can go and release them unless there's something unusual and they still help and appreciate the help rice you guys do and occasionally we still need

a little help on transporting but our numbers are again you don't have that slide but there's 52 cases where we transported this year 42 last year and the same we have a category of three years in a row and i wish you had that slide but the three year this year and then two years previous you must have transported 12 cases when we were transporting 42 i used to be away four five six years ago i mean it was just reversed so i'm happy to take the strain off the ems judge because they need to be taking care of all the live ones and all the pressure they're under and if we can free them up as soon as we get to the scene and go about our business and then we transport ourselves that's that's my aim to sergeant lease along on that slide and we'll get into drug overdoses and uh you did find that side robin i'm sorry yeah okay okay i'm sorry about that folks okay that's a new new uh slide we've started drug overdose we've asked about drugs quite a bit last few times we've talked about drugs and you seem to have

concerns about that all of us do but this shows back through 2019 that first bar graph 24 overdose deaths for the entire year and 50 last year so doubled uh from 219 to 2021. now the the last column you see 24 with a little star there that's just through five months through the end of may so already through the end of may we have 24 deaths which we had the whole year 2019 so that's where fred you've kind of been commenting on our drug deaths last couple times we've visited here so it's uh it's crazy and the next slide shows and i'm gonna i wish shayna she was she's not here deputy coroner shayna norton is very instrumental in this next slide that established an overdose fatality review team but marvin i think you may be on that too from the sheriff's department i don't know i think you have been indicated there but uh you know shayna started about uh by the end of the last year was