Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran is back at LA's morgue

The Board of Supervisors has turned to the former coroner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, to step in and try to fix things at the troubled Los Angeles County coroner's department. Sathyavagiswaran served as coroner from 1993 to 2013 and it was his retirement that led to the hiring of Mark Fajardo as coroner. Fajardo left after a little more than a year, saying that the office was under-funded and complaining that there is a backlog of 180 human remains needing autopsies. He's going back to his old job running Riverside County's morgue.

Sathyavagiswaran has continued to do autopsies on a contract basis. The Board of Supervisors voted on Tuesday to hire him as interim coroner for the county.

From the Daily News:

“Dr. Lakshmanan has previously served in this leadership capacity in the coroner’s office,” Supervisor Michael Antonovich said in a statement. “He is a skilled clinician, a qualified medical examiner — fully prepared to take the helm. He has the full support of the board as (he) takes on this responsibility.”...

He was coroner during the O.J. Simpson case, and attempted to restore credibility to the department — through his testimony — following errors highlighted during the trial that were made during an investigator’s autopsies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman....

Sathyavagiswaran performed Michael Jackson’s autopsy, testified in the trial of record producer Phil Spector and, in an unusual move, changed actress Natalie Wood’s 1981 manner of death from “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”