Magazines

• Falls: A Leading Cause of Accidental Death, Summer 2024, Chester County Medicine
• The Ghost Room, July 2024, Killer Nashville Magazine
• Teeth: Creative nonfiction piece, August 2022 issue, The Sun Magazine (Readers Write)

Popular Articles

• Coroner History: A couple of hundred years ago, transportation deaths involved horses and wagons, but when trains first appeared, they were not uncommon instruments of death. I wrote about the fascinating 200+ year-history of Chester County, PA’s Coroner’s Office for Chester County Medicine. You can access the PDF here.
• Death Certification: The death certificate may be the most enduring document of most lives, as genealogists know. It’s also the source of all mortality statistics. A death certificate is chock-full of the details of a life, not just a death. Yet those who sign them rarely have any training in death certification and often consider them an unreimbursed paperwork nuisance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a deluge of death certificates that had to be signed quickly. Read about “Death Certificates in the Time of COVID” in this PDF from the Spring 2020 issue of Chester County Medicine.

Reports

• Coroner/Medical Examiner Services in Pennsylvania: A multi-year study using qualitative and quantitative surveys and public information. Conducted under a grant from the Center for Rural PA. Full study here. PDF executive summary here.
• Letter from the Coroner – 2021 Annual Report: The letters I wrote for the department’s annual report were a personal reflection on both highlights and disappointments of the year, never more so than during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. My last letter is provided here as a PDF. Full reports for this and previous years are available on the Chester County Coroner’s Office website.