The Cobb County Medical examiner is now working out of the new facility on County Services Parkway.

The new building cost $11 million, and measures 19-thousand square feet. The primary funding source for the project was SPLOST 2016, and the design and engineering was by Croft & Associates.

The old facility was built in the late 1970s, and the explosive growth of the county in the decades since then rendered it obsolete.

“The original Medical Examiner’s office was built in 1978 when Cobb County only had 200-thousand people, and it has not significantly been expanded since then,” said Dr. Christopher Gulledge, Cobb County’s Medical Examiner for the county’s news release on the facility. “Today Cobb County has 750-thousand people and we needed significant expansion to meet the need for the county.”

Dr. Gulledge said that even though the Medical Examiner’s office is best known for working on cases for law enforcement and the courts, the office is independent of those bodies.

“The current situation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic shows a clear need for constant disease surveillance. We can provide real-time data to the Public Health Department to help them track where the coronavirus is in our county,” Dr. Gulledge said.

The news release described the design and engineering of the building as follows:

Croft and Associates provided the architectural and engineering services for the building, which was largely funded from the 2016 SPLOST program. Voters in Cobb will be asked to renew the one-cent SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) program in November. For more information, visit www.CobbSPLOST2022.org.

About the medical examiners office

The duties of the county medical examiner are set by state law, and include investigation of the following circumstances of death:

1. As a result of violence;
2. By suicide or casualty;
3. Suddenly when in apparent good health;
4. When unattended by a physician;*
5. In any suspicious or unusual manner, with particular attention to those persons 16 years of age and under;
6. After birth but before seven years of age if the death is unexpected or unexplained;
7. As a result of an execution carried out pursuant to the imposition of the death penalty under Article 2 of Chapter 10 of Title 17;
8. When an inmate of a state hospital or a state, county, or city penal institution; or
9. After having been admitted to a hospital in an unconscious state and without regaining consciousness within 24 hours of admission.