Deciding on an Autopsy After a Sudden Death

When the choice is not yours

In many cases there is nothing to decide. Government Code section 27491 requires the coroner to investigate certain deaths, violent, sudden or unusual deaths, deaths from injury or accident, suspected homicide or suicide, deaths in custody, and deaths arising from employment, among others.

Where that applies, the coroner decides whether to perform an autopsy and the family cannot prevent it. The body is held as long as the investigation requires.

When the choice is yours

If the coroner declines jurisdiction, or accepts it but performs only an external examination, the family may arrange a private autopsy at their own expense.

People most often face this after a death in a hospital or care facility, where the death is attributed to an underlying condition and no one is treating it as suspicious. That is precisely the situation in which a family’s instinct that something went wrong is most likely to be both correct and unprovable later.

What it costs and how long you have

A private autopsy in California typically runs in the low thousands of dollars, more with extensive toxicology or neuropathology. That cost may be recoverable later as a case expense.

The window is short. Embalming alters tissue and can destroy toxicological evidence, and cremation ends the question permanently. If there is any doubt, delay cremation and call a lawyer before you authorize it. This is the single most irreversible decision in the first week.

Why it matters to a claim

• It establishes cause of death with specificity a death certificate rarely provides
• It can distinguish a death caused by injury from one caused by an underlying condition, the central dispute in most contested cases
• It can rebut an assumption of impairment or natural causes made early and never revisited
• It preserves tissue and samples for testing that cannot be recreated once the body is gone

What an autopsy will not do

It will not tell you who was at fault, and it will not always give a clear answer. Sometimes the finding is undetermined, and that is an honest result rather than a failure.

It also will not, in most cases, delay a funeral significantly. A private autopsy is usually performed within a day or two once arranged.

A practical note on the report

The autopsy report is not the last word. It is a professional opinion formed quickly, sometimes without information the family has, the medication the person had just been started on, the fall nobody documented, the complaint made to a nurse three days earlier.

Bring that information forward. A manner-of-death determination can be revisited, and it sometimes should be.

We obtain the coroner reports, investigation, autopsy and toxicology, at no charge for wrongful death heirs in any California county, and we read them for you so the contents can be conveyed respectfully. These are not documents a grieving family should read. Call (951) 354-5700.