It's time we asked why Williamson County doesn't have a medical examiner | Opinion

You're not supposed to talk about death in polite company. That sounds like something your parents would tell you. But my life cannot exist without death and this moment requires me to talk about it.

As one of four justices of the peace in Williamson County, I spend at least 25% of my living (and sleeping) hours being intimately entangled with death. With no medical examiner, in a county of over 700,000 human souls, I serve on rotation with three other judges to be on call for what is now over 1,000 deaths per year. Every one of them must be reviewed by one of the four of us – elected judges with a full-time day job in court hearing backlogged criminal and civil dockets ranging from evictions to debt cases, small claims suits, truancy hearings for students (and their parents), vehicle tow hearings, criminal plea hearings, animal seizure hearings, not to mention trials by judge and jury on any of those matters.

I've told this story once before – to a mother, as an explanation of why I hadn't been more immediately available to talk to her. And you know what she said to me?

"Frankly Judge, I don't give a [****] what all else you have to do, I'm just trying to get answers and bury my son."

And she was right. She deserved more.

But so did every case that came before her and has since. Thousands of surviving families, friends, caretakers, powers of attorney, long-lost relatives, and sometimes – the saddest, when nobody is left behind in the wake of that intimate moment of someone's passing.

Every one of them deserves more than being dependent on one of four serving judges being a phone call away from death.

It doesn't have to be this way. In fact, every single Texas county larger than Williamson has a County Medical Examiner or District and does not rely on delegating the duty to the Justices of the Peace. In fact, there are over a half a dozen counties with populations smaller than Wilco with Medical Examiner's offices, with another two counties, both many times smaller than us, making the shift from JPs to MEs.

I think it's time the public asked the question of why Williamson County doesn't have a Medical Examiner.

It's certainly not because it's not needed.

I felt this acutely last week, because I was the on-call judge, and I processed two deaths within 15 hours of each other. Both were young white men, one 34 and the other 18. Both potential fentanyl poisoning – part of a wave of over 70 drug overdoses and up to 9 other deaths that rocked Austin this past week. Each has been sent for autopsy in coordination with the other Travis County deaths now being investigated by trained personnel of the Travis County Medical Examiner's office. One centralized place and process for aiding in the search for answers, and for justice. I was lucky to have TCME to work with.

So again, the need is there. So why don't we have a medical examiner in Williamson County?

How can something that was a good idea to better serve the public over a decade ago when it was last broached at our Commissioner’s Court, be any less urgent now, hundreds of thousands of new residents later? I know you can’t build it overnight, but we're so far behind on the planning that some say it’s still 10 years away.

I'm grateful for County Judge Bill Gravell asking the four judges to work with the court on a plan for interim solutions involving death investigators starting as soon as the next fiscal year. I'm happy to engage in any conversation with the court that improves county services for the public, but I will continue to advocate for a Medical Examiner as our end goal.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr said, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

The biggest critique of the four justices of the peace is that we have broken the silence that exists around death because we feel the fierce urgency of now so personally and so frequently.

Williamson County deserves a Medical Examiner. The sooner, the better.

Musselman is the Justice of the Peace for Precinct 1 in Williamson County.