Louisiana parish coroner's office to be led by grant coordinator after incumbent fails to qualify

A confluence of circumstance, coincidence and error have resulted in Lafourche joining an exclusive club, those few parishes whose coroners are not licensed physicians.

Kayla Breaux, currently the parish’s Community Development Block Grant coordinator, will take the oath of office as Lafourche Parish Coroner on March 25, replacing the incumbent, John King, M.D. King would have remained coroner but was late bringing his candidate qualification papers to the parish clerk, missing the 4:30 p.m. deadline Aug. 10, the last day of Louisiana’s candidate qualification process. His tardiness was anywhere from one to three minutes, according to all available accounts.

The technicality made Breaux coroner by default even though – as state law normally requires – she is not a medical doctor.

Breaux is enthusiastic about having won the opportunity.

“It is exciting,” said Breaux, who worked as an assistant to King between 2018 and 2022, also receiving some special coroner-related training during that time. “No woman has done this, and now I am a woman in forensics … to take over this position and put my knowledge into it and what I know and what the parish needs and what this office needs.”

State law mandates that “the coroner shall be a physician licensed by the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners to practice medicine in the state of Louisiana.”

However, the law goes on to say that the physician requirement “shall be waived in any parish in which no licensed physician qualifies to run for the office,” which is precisely what happened in Lafourche.

King regrets that his own actions resulted in the punctuality gaffe, in particular because of pride in how the office has developed during his tenure.

“I made this office, shaped it into the office it is,” King said. “I brought all the tools necessary to bring up the standards of the Lafourche Parish Coroner’s Office into real time. And I enjoyed doing it.”

FARMING AUTOPSIES OUT

Law enforcement and medical professionals who have worked with King don’t dispute his assessment. But King also has clashed through the years with some officials and several former employees, including Breaux. She declined to address the topic after stating she is intent on making changes upon taking office.

“I don’t want to go into that,” she said. “I am not going to be that person who is going to talk bad about the coroner in office now.”

She did say that she disapproves of bodies being sent out of town for autopsies, sometimes at high cost, which King says was sometimes necessitated due to the COVID epidemic, a loss of facilities after Hurricane Ida and other factors.

“I want to have our facility open and running and our bodies staying in Lafourche Parish,” she said.

Although the circumstances of Breaux becoming coroner have an air of intrigue, there are no allegations nor indications that any of the actions taken by parish officials – including those eventually encouraging Breaux to run – are afoul of any law or accepted ethics.

Interviews last week confirmed belief among parish officials that King would not run. Parish President Archie Chaisson III acknowledges polling local medical doctors for months to run for office in case that was King’s decision. King says he was not consulted at any time regarding the matter. Chaisson said he contacted six physicians in total.

King and Chaisson confirm that there is no love lost between them.

King blames Chaisson for undermining him and setting the stage for circumstances leading to his eventual loss of the position.

The qualifying period ended 10 days before the Lafourche Parish District Attorney released a statement that says an investigation of alleged public contract fraud against King had ended, with no criminal charges resulting. King’s failure to timely qualify was not related directly to the investigation, which still was considered open by the qualifying deadline.

“The problem here was Archie Chaisson, from my prior dealings with him when he worked in the Charlotte Randolph administration,” King said, referring to the parish president who first encouraged him to seek the position of coroner. “Archie Chaisson thought he was the boss of the coroner’s office. The coroner’s office is a state office, not a parish office. The parish just pays the bills.”

CHECKING THE WEBSITES

Chaisson said the potential that King might not run for another term was surmised because of the now-ended investigation, and that he wanted the parish to have a coroner in place if that occurred.

With no doctors running, Chaisson said, Breaux’s name was brought up by the parish’s chief administrator, Mitch Orgeron, during a conversation they had about 4 p.m. Aug. 10, one half hour before the deadline.

“Mitch reached out to her, and she happened to be in the area and was already thinking about doing it, and she called me,” said Chaisson, explaining how the candidacy came about from his perspective.

Breaux recalled things a little differently.

She said she was constantly checking the Louisiana Secretary of State’s website on Aug. 9 and 10 on her own, to see if King or another physician qualified. She was asked if she received a phone call close to qualifying telling her King was not running and she answered, “No.”

“I had no, no inside sources,” she said. “Nothing that he was not running. That’s why I was honestly to God checking that site every 30 minutes to see if he was going to qualify, because I knew if he would qualify then it’s all over for me.”

When the window was almost closed, between 4:15 and 4:20, Breaux said, she showed up at the Clerk of Court’s office, filled out the paperwork and turned it in along with a $450 filing fee.

While Breaux filled out forms at the clerk’s office, King was fuming at traffic, trying to get there.

According to King, a member of his staff had fulfilled his request for information on the qualifying deadline by texting him a screen shot of a web page “runforoffice.org.” Run by a non-profit organization, the website has a database of elections throughout the nation with qualifying information including dates.

But the site incorrectly listed the cutoff for the coroner’s race as Aug. 11 rather than Aug. 10.

BEATING THE CLOCK

King provided the text he received, which included the date he received it.

“So, I had that thing that said Friday and figured I had until the 11th to do it,” King said. “It had been a busy day. But I got a call from one of the council people, and he said it’s 4 o’clock and that I needed to get to the clerk by 4:30 that day. I get in my car and get stopped at every red light going, and there’s traffic all the way up there, and I get there, it’s 31 after the hour.”

An official who had viewed surveillance videos from the building said King arrived at 4:33 p.m., according to their time stamps. Reporters were not allowed to view the recordings due to restrictions in Louisiana’s Public Records Act.,

Now that she will by all indications be Lafourche’s new coroner, Breaux says the territory is thoroughly familiar to her. Her duties will include overseeing death investigations, collection of rape evidence and administrating cases where an individual is deemed unable to care for themselves or otherwise as a danger to themselves or others, requiring a commitment for evaluation.

Deputy coroners, who are medical doctors, she noted, can perform autopsies and also review the other types of cases that are in the coroner’s purview. Physicians who have worked around her when she was at the coroner’s office describe her as capable and say they have no doubt she will do a good job.

EXPERTS WEIGH IN

Gerry Cvitaovich, M.D. is the coroner of Jefferson Parish and president of the Louisiana Coroner’s Association.

“There are at least 10 other parishes that survive with a non-physician coroner,” Cvitanovich said. “Lafourche will be the biggest. There are certain limitations when the coroner is not a physician, but non-physicians are capable of doing their work.”

Michael Baden, an M.D. who is the world-renowned former New York City medical examiner, was asked what kind of difference having a non-doctor might make.

“In small counties, the one thing I have found over the years is that coroners get elected because they know how to deal with the families of dead people,” Baden said, noting that 95 percent of deaths are due to natural causes and that autopsies are often not needed.

“My opinion is that in general physicians are better trained and better equipped to do a good job as a medical examiner or coroner,” he said, while also noting the circumstances involving King’s tardiness for qualifying. “But everybody has to obey the laws."

This article originally appeared on The Courier: Lafourche Parish incumbent coroner fails to qualify