When Coroner Hayley Thompson sat down for a Cascadia Daily News “Faces in the Crowd” profile at the end of her ten years leading the Skagit County Coroner’s Office, she wasn’t just reflecting on a decade of service. She was describing a problem that stretches from Mount Vernon to Washington, D.C. — and one that Derrill Fussell believes has to be part of any honest conversation about who leads this office next.
Thompson, who is president-elect of the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners, put it plainly when asked about the biggest problems facing the profession nationally: “So definitely, it’s money. It comes down a lot to just the money.” She described coroners in other parts of the country who are paid by the case, or who earn only a couple thousand dollars a year for work they do out of their own homes — using their own computers, their own vehicles, to transport the dead. “So if you’re having to do all these things for yourself,” she said, “just imagine how difficult it is to try to meet those standards or have that ability to just do everything over the top, because you’re not getting anything for it.”
That’s not a Skagit County problem in isolation. It’s a national one. The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice has described the challenge of strengthening death investigation across the country as a “daunting task” precisely because there is no single national system — just thousands of separate coroner and medical examiner offices, each with its own funding, staffing, and standards, spread across nearly every county in America. A comprehensive needs assessment by NIJ found forensic labs and coroner/medical examiner offices alike operating under sustained strain, which is part of why the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance now runs a dedicated grant program, “Strengthening the Medical Examiner-Coroner System,” to help local offices catch up on basic infrastructure and staffing. In Congress, a bipartisan bill introduced by Reps. Cleaver and Guest and Sens. Cornyn and Murphy specifically targets the nationwide shortage of forensic pathologists — a shortage so severe that some regions wait weeks for autopsy results families need to grieve, settle estates, and get insurance claims processed.
Skagit County has actually been one of the good stories in this national picture. Under Thompson’s leadership, the office earned accreditation from the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners in February 2024 — just the 39th office in the country, and only the seventh in Washington state, to reach that standard. That accreditation didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the outgoing coroner treated professional standards as something worth fighting for, even in a field where, as she pointed out, being underfunded makes it “difficult to try to meet those standards” at all.
That’s exactly the bar Derrill Fussell has said he intends to protect and build on. Fussell isn’t running because he claims to already know everything about death investigation — he’s the first to say neither he nor his opponent has direct coroner experience. What he is running on is a commitment to the things that don’t require a medical degree to get right: fighting for the resources this office needs so it never becomes one of the home-office, personal-vehicle operations Thompson described; keeping Skagit’s hard-won accreditation intact; and treating every family who walks through that door — or gets a knock at theirs — with the same honesty and respect, whatever their circumstances.
That last point is where Thompson’s remarks may matter most. Asked about her office’s long-standing focus on honoring unclaimed remains, she said: “Everybody has a story. Everybody has loved ones. And it’s unfortunate in a lot of these unclaimed cases that there is nobody there that wants to take them.” Some families have simply run out — lost to time, distance, or estrangement. Others have chosen to stay away, sometimes for reasons rooted in real harm. Thompson’s answer was the same either way: honor the person. “When people come through our office, they’re all the same,” she said, “doesn’t matter if they’re high profile… or somebody who is found as a transient on the street.”
That principle is personal for Fussell. After losing his own son, he has said he is running to bring compassion, dignity, and clear communication to every family the Coroner’s Office serves — not just the ones with someone to call. In a field where the national conversation keeps circling back to money, staffing, and inconsistent standards, Fussell’s pitch to Skagit County voters is straightforward: fund the office properly, hold the professional line Thompson raised, and never let a shortage of resources become an excuse for a shortage of dignity.
Learn more about Derrill’s platform and how to cast a write-in vote for Coroner at fussellforcoroner.com.