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Fact check: Is it a fact that I can find out the name of the medical examiner

Checked on October 18, 2025

Executive Summary

You can sometimes find the name of a medical examiner in published articles or office materials, but availability varies by document and jurisdiction: some sources explicitly list chief and assistant examiners while others focus on procedures or recommendations without naming individuals. The supplied materials show examples where names are published (e.g., Michael Graham, Kanayo Tatsumi, and multiple NYC examiners) alongside several authoritative documents that discuss standards and technology without providing staff names [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].

1. Claim and Immediate Evidence — Who says names are findable and where they appear

The assertion that one can find a medical examiner’s name is supported by article excerpts that explicitly identify individual examiners: Michael Graham is named as Chief Medical Examiner for St. Louis since 1989 and Kanayo Tatsumi as an Assistant since 2019, which demonstrates that some public-facing documents include staff names [1]. Similarly, a New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner article lists Angela Soler, Justin Z Goldstein, Aden Naka, and Stephanie Santiago as staff in the Forensic Anthropology and Identifications Units, which again confirms that official publications sometimes list personnel by name [2]. These examples show findability in practice within the supplied corpus.

2. Counter-evidence — When sources avoid naming individuals and focus on policy

Several authoritative pieces in the provided material do not facilitate finding a medical examiner’s name because they center on procedures, standards, or technology rather than personnel. A national survey-style document emphasizing technology use in ME and coroner offices discusses imaging adoption and implementation challenges but does not provide staff rosters or naming guidance [3]. Position papers from the National Association of Medical Examiners emphasize standards for second autopsies and deaths in custody without addressing accessibility of individual examiner names, illustrating that subject-matter authority often separates procedural guidance from personnel directories [4] [5].

3. What the examples imply about variability across jurisdictions

The juxtaposition of named examiners in local office publications with unnamed national guidance suggests significant variability in how and when names are published. Local investigative or identification-focused articles may list team members to credit work or enable contact, while national association documents prioritize recommendations and quality control, not individual identification [1] [2] [4]. This pattern implies that whether a name is findable depends less on a universal rule and more on the document type and institutional purpose, with operational or public-facing narratives more likely to include staff names.

4. Transparency versus procedural focus — competing institutional priorities

The supplied sources reveal two institutional priorities that can produce different outcomes: transparency/attribution and procedural standard-setting. Office-level publications that report on identifications or investigative methods tend to include names as part of credit and public transparency [2]. Conversely, national position papers concentrate on best practices for autopsies and reporting and omit personnel details, reflecting an organizational agenda that privileges uniform practice over staff disclosure [4] [5]. Readers seeking names should therefore target publications aligned with transparency goals.

5. Practical inference from supplied materials — how to proceed if you need a name

Based solely on the supplied analyses, the most reliable path to finding a medical examiner’s name is to consult local office reports, identification-case write-ups, or jurisdictional announcements where staff are credited, since these source types have previously listed names [1] [2]. Documents that are technical surveys or association position papers are unlikely to contain names, so a search focused on local office web pages, case summaries, or press releases would be consistent with the evidence provided. This approach aligns with the demonstrated pattern of where names appear.

6. Missing information and caveats in the provided corpus

The provided analyses lack direct statements about legal access, jurisdictional public-record rules, or a systematic directory of medical examiners, so they cannot establish a universal right to discover names across all contexts [3] [5]. The materials also do not include explicit timelines for updates of staff listings or describe exceptions where names are withheld. Therefore, while the corpus shows examples of discoverable names, it does not prove that names are always publicly available or that a single method will work in every jurisdiction.

7. Bottom line — what the evidence supports and what it does not

The evidence in the supplied materials supports the proposition that you can often find a medical examiner’s name in local, public-facing publications, but it also demonstrates that many authoritative documents focus on standards and omit personnel names [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. The conclusion is conditional: names are findable in some contexts shown here, but the corpus does not support a universal claim that a name can always be discovered by the same means in every locality.

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