News

Mason County Coroner Wes Stockwell has announced that he will seek re-election this fall. Stockwell, a 1976 graduate of Shelton High School and a retired sergeant with the Washington State Patrol, was first elected to the position in 2006. In a news release, Stockwell cites three significant accomplishments during his current term. The first was establishing contracts with Kitsap and Thurston counties for the use of their autopsy facilities. He noted that both counties have new, state of the art autopsy suites, including digital x-ray equipment. Second was the transferring of 73 years of microfilmed coroner files to digital format. Archived coroner records are now easily accessed via a computer instead of using rolls of microfilm and a microfilm projector. “Searches of records that once took hours now only takes a few minutes”, Stockwell said. And the third accomplishment was transitioning from paper to electronic death certificates. When Stockwell took over as coroner, paper death certificates had to be typed or hand-written, then hand-delivered to funeral homes or the health department, Stockwell said. They can now be completed and delivered securely over the internet. Stockwell and his deputy coroners are required to be on-call 24-hours a day to respond to approximately 250 non-medically attended deaths each year. Stockwell said that the most difficult and rewarding part of his job is working with the families and loved ones of the deceased. Stockwell has a master’s degree in public administration and says that his years of investigative experience and supervising an office for the Washington State Patrol prepared him well for his current role. Additionally, he has passed national level death investigation examinations conducted by the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, and has trained with the New York City Medical Examiner.