President-Elect Frank Perez introduced our speaker.

He said Dr. Harshbarger received his Medical Doctorate degree from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and his Jurist Doctorate from Southern Illinois University School of Law. He received his Masters of Business Administration from Wright State University. He completed an anatomic and clinical pathology residency at Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, Indiana and a forensic pathology fellowship at the Montgomery County Coroner's Office in Dayton, Ohio.

After training Dr. Harshbarger worked for a  short time as a forensic pathologist serving the majority of central Illinois and then returned to Dayton to serve as a Deputy Coroner/Forensic Pathologist for Montgomery County in 2002. He currently serves as the Montgomery County Coroner, taking the place of Coroner Jim Davis when he retired in 2011. Besides being Coroner he also serves as a colonel in the army Reserve assigned as a Regional Armed Forces Medical Examiner. He holds appointments as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at Wright State University School of Medicine and in the Department of Specialty Medicine at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. He has a wife Kelley and they have two children, Karoline, and Kristian.

 Dr. Harshbarger's presentation was designed to show the difference between the TV CSI version of what takes place when a coroner is called, and what coroners actually do.

In Ohio Coroners have to have a doctor's degree, which is not true in all the other states, such as Kentucky, he said. He said the coroner is not running around working with law enforcement. His job involves finding out what caused the death: Was it a homicide or a suicide, not who did it, he said. 

"We try to help the living and reduce crime." They do research with death cases to help the living, he said.

Some 70 percent are natural.

In other states a medical examiner replaces a doctor as coroner, and that is usually very expensive, he said.

In Ohio the coroner is a back up commissioner. If two commissioners are gone, he serves as a back up county commissioner, he said.

He showed a number of slides, explaining as he went, noting how advanced things are and can be traced with just trace evidence. Fingerprints are good, but palm prints and shoe prints can also be used when looking at a possible crime scene, he said. A scene sketch is made. He spoke about the Oregon District shooting in which a red shirt was found across the street. DNA matches helped link the shirt back to the crime. There were two male suspects.  The DNA came back with a black male. The grand jury failed to indite. There were fingerprints on the gun. The unknown male A had unknown male B, a white male as a roommate.  It turned out they had Dollar General knives in their drawers. DNA cannot tell identical twins, he said. There are more fingerprints but palm prints can give more data, he said.

A human being makes the final interpretation, he said.

When a culvert was stopped up by a trash bag, they found a skeleton in the bag. There was a little skin and two tattoos that came from a boxer in Dayton. There were dental records and they had a palm print.

There was a casket and the people wanted the skull but they opened the wrong end of the casket. There was a shoe print on the top, a known Adidas tread. It was a Stanley work boot. A detective at the crime scene ran into a man at the Kentucky Fried Chicken who confessed to opening the casket.

In another case teenagers aged 17 were driving a Jeep Cherokee when they crashed, and it was investigated as a deer strike. They had super glued car hairs on the grill of the car. The suspect admitted driving drunk and using hairs from a stuffed bobcat for the deer.

Dr. Harshbarger said he wears gloves when he works and doesn't interview in the dark, as they often show  on the CSI TV show. He said he has an investigative staff.

 

 

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