PHOTO BY DEAN OLSEN
Sangamon County Coroner Jim Allmon shows off the spacious autopsy area in the newly renovated coroner’s office during public tours of the new facility on June 11. The office, at Sangamon South, 300 S. Ninth St. in Springfield, began receiving remains of deceased people on June 13
Coroners speak for the dead. In doing so, they play a key role in bringing accountability to the living.
That’s why Sangamon County Coroner Jim Allmon was emotional when he spoke at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his recently opened regional morgue in the former State Journal-Register building in Springfield.
“We’re in a position now to better help people, and that’s really what our mission is,” said Allmon, 51, a Republican and coroner’s office employee since 2003. He has been the elected coroner since 2020. “We’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time. This facility is built with our loved and our lost in mind. We ensure every case is handled with professionalism, care and compassion.”
It was Allmon’s dream for Sangamon County to have its own freestanding morgue, replacing the county’s longtime use of facilities inside Springfield Memorial Hospital for autopsies and refrigerated storage space for bodies at both Springfield Memorial and HSHS St. John’s Hospital.
The new morgue and coroner’s office will result in more effective and efficient operations, Allmon said. Included are larger and more convenient spaces for autopsies, as well as private spaces for families of the deceased and police and other officials investigating suspicious or undetermined deaths.
And the office’s expansion over the past year to make its services more attractive to county coroners in central and southern Illinois will reduce Sangamon County taxpayers’ burden for supporting the office and make professional death investigations more convenient to access, Allmon said.
The National Academy of Sciences in 2009 recommended many changes to the patchwork of coroner, medical examiner and death-investigation systems across the country to institute more professionalism, consistency and accuracy. But few improvements have resulted.
A 2011 investigation by the PBS program “Frontline” stated, “Blunders by doctors in America’s morgues have put innocent people in prison cells, allowed the guilty to go free, and left some cases so muddled that prosecutors could do nothing.”
Morgan County Coroner Marcy Patterson said the regional morgue in Springfield is a positive step forward in this part of Illinois.
“It’s an incredible opportunity for the region,” she told Illinois Times. “This gives everyone involved a state-of-the-art facility that will help us provide a consistently accurate cause and manner of death.”
The $6 million in renovations at the three-story building now known as Sangamon South, 300 S. Ninth St., allowed the coroner’s office to consolidate vehicles, equipment and personnel from four locations to one.
More than $4 million of the renovations for the coroner’s office, and for evidence-storage areas elsewhere in the building used by the sheriff’s department, came from federal COVID-19 relief funds. State funding is covering the rest of the cost of renovations.
The county bought the 135,000-square-foot SJ-R building, originally constructed in the early 1980s, from the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett, at auction for $1.25 million in 2021. The newspaper’s staff, vastly downsized since the building’s construction, currently is based in office space at 2144 S. MacArthur Blvd. in Springfield.
The largest refrigerated forensic storage space in Illinois south of Interstate 80 will be a relief for the coroner’s staff, Allmon said. The staff no longer will have to scramble to avoid decomposition of remains and transfer bodies between locations when space used to fill up at Springfield Memorial and St. John’s, he said.
Each hospital had refrigerated space for 12 to 14 bodies and no freezer space for longer-term storage. The new morgue has refrigerated space for 60 bodies, including freezer space for 12 bodies.
The new morgue, in the basement of the building only steps away from where the newspaper’s press used to roar every night, includes a sealed area for autopsies on bodies involving advanced decomposition or insect infestation.
Rapid air circulation in that area will reduce the spread of smells and other disruptions for staff members not involved in those cases, Allmon said.
PHOTO BY DEAN OLSEN
Sangamon County Coroner Jim Allmon, shown here on June 11 a refrigerated area that can store up to 60 bodies, says the newly renovated space in the former State Journal-Register building gives the county its first freestanding morgue and the ability to serve as a regional hub for forensic investigations.
With the newly renovated and more spacious facilities, along with office space for the county’s board-certified forensic pathologist, Dr. Nathaniel Patterson – no relation to Marcy Patterson – the new morgue will offer the region easier access for central and southern Illinois counties needing autopsy and related testing services, Allmon said.
Some of those counties will save money by paying Sangamon County for autopsies rather than flying in forensic pathologists from out of state – sometimes as far away as Kentucky – or having to travel and transport bodies for autopsies in Bloomington-Normal or Peoria, Allmon said.
The new fees that Sangamon County will receive for morgue services, money that otherwise would go to the two Springfield hospitals, will help reduce the need for county tax revenue to support the coroner’s office’s approximately $1 million annual budget, Allmon said.
Allmon’s office also will incur a savings by no longer needing to pay Springfield Memorial and HSHS St. John’s in rental fees and related costs, he said. That’s not to say the county isn’t grateful to the hospitals.
“They really rolled out the red carpet for us for years, and we can’t thank them enough,” Allmon said, adding that Springfield Memorial donated $200,000 worth of equipment from its own morgue for the new facility.
Allmon’s office handles more than 600 cases involving the death of people in Sangamon County each year, everything from homicides, suicide and drug overdoses to natural deaths that initially are undetermined as to the cause and manner.
In 2024, the office performed 235 autopsies on people who died in Sangamon County and more than 300 autopsies from people who died outside the county through arrangements with coroners’ offices in other counties.