A coroner in Yakima County, Washington, is facing allegations of evidence tampering, false statements, and official misconduct after he claimed he was poisoned with drugs at work when allegedly he was actually doing drugs on the job that he stole off of dead bodies. One has to wonder if he is aware that there are living people you can call to buy drugs.
According to the Yakima Herald-Republic, county coroner Jim Curtice reportedly has a history of substance abuse dating back to at least March 2023, when he got into a confrontation with deputies who’d escorted him home from a bar. At the time, his wife blamed his behavior on posttraumatic stress disorder stemming from his long career as a firefighter and paramedic.
The whole stealing-drugs-off-of-corpses story began when Curtice was found unconscious at work. He said someone had spiked his drinks with hard drugs. But his story changed a bit after an investigation revealed that he had been regularly using drugs at the coroner’s office, at which point he admitted that he mixed drugs into his various daily beverages. A drug test found fentanyl in his urine. The water inside his teakettle had traces of fentanyl and cocaine. Detectives later found drugs just hanging around on his desk. The cops eventually gave him a polygraph test, which likely caused the machine to explode.
It should be noted that polygraph tests are inadmissible evidence in a courtroom, but a lot of cops still use them sometimes to get a baseline idea of whether there’s any truth to a suspect’s statements. Once he was told that he failed the lie detector test, he allegedly admitted to using drugs three times a week for several months in his office. When the police asked how he got the drugs, they probably expected him to say from a dealer or off of the dark web. They probably didn’t expect him to readily admit that he got the drugs off of dead bodies that came into his coroner’s office.
He reportedly admitted to mixing the drugs into his protein powder and mixing it into his teakettle to add some very weak evidence to his claim about getting drugged by some mysterious nefarious force. Curtice is now on administrative leave and his case has been referred to a prosecutor’s office in another county to get around any potential conflicts of interest that would arise from keeping it within Yakima County.
The post County Coroner Accused of Stealing Drugs from Dead Bodies appeared first on VICE.
The post County Coroner Accused of Stealing Drugs from Dead Bodies appeared first on VICE.
