So these are all the folders from the years.

So this is, it's like, ‘09, and then 10, and then kind of goes on from there.

So its like a library thing.

[wheel turning] So each one of those folders is, you know the story of someone's life and certainly the story of their death.

[music building] Theres no surprise that that at the coroner's office, there's there's no happy endings, right?

There's no... nobody's saved.

So this is our main morgue.

The bodies are brought in from the cooler and then laid out and then processed.

You're coming face to face with the worst tragedies imaginable.

Whatever is the worst thing that happened in your community the night before, that's the work that we're going to be doing They go into the outgoing cooler for funeral homes to come pick them up.

And that takes a toll on you, for sure.

[door opening] But out of figuring out what happened and what went wrong, [glove snaps] there's healing and hope and change that comes from it.

And there's an incredible amount of meaning and purpose and satisfaction in that.

[door opening] Every night, we get a text message as a team about, essentially, what deaths have occurred, and so that's kind of the last thing I see before I go to bed.

We average around four to five autopsies a day.

We work six days a week.

We do not do autopsies on Sunday, and so Mondays here at this office can be very busy, upwards of ten, 12 or 14 cases.

In the old days, we had to, like, boil the bones in a pot and then scrape off the meat.

And it was time consuming, and so we worked with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and they gave us, some flesh-eating beetles, so necrophilus beetles.

They dont eat living flesh.

They only eat dead flesh, but they're in here.

In my 17 years here, weve certainly had more than our fair share of high-profile and demanding cases between the rise of fentanyl and because of the opioid crisis.

We worked through a global pandemic.

We've had, unfortunately, our fair share of mass shootings in this community.

And then certainly, you know, the Return to Nature incident that occurred in Fremont County.

This office supports about 20 other counties, about a third of Colorado, because we have a national shortage of forensic pathologists.

Some of these more rural areas, they don't have the resources and the expertise.

If you die there, the bodies are coming to us.

Every autopsy we do, we take representative sections of every organ, sometimes multiple sections, and then we put them in jar a with formalin to fix them in case we need to go back later and look at the tissue under the microscope.

So every one of those bottles is a person.

That's a kidney.

There's a liver.

So, like, every organ in your body.

By law, like, these are all the homicides here.

So we have to keep these forever in case there's ever a question as to whether what we said they died from, they really died from.

One of the key things that you have to develop in this position is the ability to compartmentalize.

And in many ways, the shutting it down is the easy part, but the challenge of this job, and many others like it, is that you also have to be able to turn those emotions back on because you've got to go and talk to a family.

You've got to be able to connect with them and have empathy for them.

That's, that's, that's when it hurts, to be honest with you.

[keypad beeping] [door opening] This is our evidence room.

This is where all the evidence goes, so you know, the ligatures, the bullets.

Just this June over there from 2024.

So this is just the last, you know, whatever, four or five months.

That tub right there marked “Death Notes,” that's a tub completely full of suicide notes.

And we fill it up every couple of years, and so to read through those a couple times a week, that in and of itself is a pretty, pretty difficult part of the job.

You always keep in your mind that while this moment is awful, right?

What I'm doing right now is difficult and challenging.

What I'm learning as I'm doing these autopsies ultimately is going to save lives later.

We don't do autopsies for the dead, we do them for the living.

You're part of the overall progress by having, honestly, the courage to face the worst things that we have.

That's how good comes.

It doesn't come from sticking your head in the sand and pretending like these things aren't happening, that fentanyl isn't real, or that viruses aren't real, right?

We don't get better because of that.

We get better because we, we delve deep into what happened, and then we apply that knowledge to ways in which we can make our life better.

When every single day of your life is about death, it certainly changes your perspective on how you should live your life.

I tend to have a pretty broad perspective on what things are really going to worry me and trouble me.

And most of the things that we spend our time arguing or worrying about, relative to lives Ive dealt with today, or the end of the lives Ive dealt with today aren't that big of a deal.

You don't get many of these seconds.

They tick away pretty quickly, and they can be gone a moment.

And so, make the most of them.