The Office of the
Chief Medical Examiner (O.C.M.E.) is
mandated under Chapter 61 of the West
Virginia code to investigate and certify
all deaths that occur within the state
of West Virginia that are the result of
violence, suspected violence, deaths due
to accidental causes, deaths that occur
during incarceration, deaths that are
associated with conditions that pose a
hazard to the public safety or health,
and all unattended or unexplained
deaths.
The OCME pursues
this mission by utilizing the principles
of medicolegal death investigation to
supplement forensic autopsy expertise,
in order to work hand-in-hand with the
West Virginia court system and a wide
range of state public safety and health
agencies towards the overall goal of
reducing social violence and other
preventable injury, and to monitor the
prevalence of certain conditions that
threaten the safety and health of all
our communities.
Helping to insure
the application of our laws to the
purposes of justice:
Providing
accurate and impartial forensic and
scientific findings to police
investigators and to courts of law.
Providing
forensic pathology and forensic medical
services to county and state agencies
that are responsible for the care of our
youth, the elderly, and persons
requiring long term supervision.
Provides
specialized training and certification
for county based death investigators and
other professions charged with the
public safety.
Provides 24 hour,
7 day medicolegal consultation services
to all public safety and public health
requests.
Provides
specialized educational services to West
Virginia public safety and public health
agencies and to West Virginia
institutions of medical education:
Provides graduate
level medical and forensic scientific
educational services to West Virginia
medical school systems and to the West
Virginia State Police Academy.
Provides forensic
medicine training for a broad spectrum
of social services providers.
Provides clinical
clerkships in the areas of forensic
pathology and allied forensic sciences
for West Virginia medical school
systems.
Delivering public
safety and public health services to the
community:
The OCME provides
important information used to evaluate
the effectiveness of medical and social
services that are provided to the
citizens of West Virginia.
By investigating
and reporting the causes of all
out-of-hospital deaths, certain
in-hospital deaths, and deaths occurring
in public institutions such as jails,
prisons, and state hospitals.
The OCME
intensively reviews all children’s
deaths as an integral part of the Child
Fatality Review Team to identify and
report common factors and circumstances
that might help to prevent such deaths
in the future.
The West Virginia
Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team
reviews certain deaths that are the
result of domestic violence, in order to
report the incidence of such events and
to discover ways in which West Virginia
can address the growing problem of
domestic violence.
Utilizing the
expertise of more than 85 county-based
investigators, the OCME gathers crucial
information regarding the circumstances
of certain deaths that occur in our
state that provide invaluable
information to federal public safety and
health agencies, to alert them to
potential hazards to the public welfare.
Our responsibility
to investigate accidental deaths or
deaths due to suspected violent causes
mandates our involvement in fatalities
that occur as the result of accidental
or non-accidental catastrophe.
