Waiting for answers
About seven months ago, Westbrook lost a vibrant, young woman, 18-year-old Alanna Phillips-Crocker, who died two weeks before she would have graduated from high school.
By all accounts, Phillips-Crocker was a bright and kind person, full of energy and creativity, and her friends and family struggled to cope with losing her at such a young age.
As if that loss weren’t enough, her friends and parents, Kevin Crocker and Sandra Phillips, had to grieve for months without knowing the cause of her tragic death. That’s far too long.
Phillips-Crocker came home one night last May from a concert she had attended with friends. Before going to bed, she spent some time on the computer with her mother planning a vacation.
When her parents, Kevin Crocker and Sandra Phillips, woke up the next morning, Phillips-Crocker was dead.
As her parents planned her funeral, her classmates prepared to graduate without her. In early June, after a graduation practice, the senior class and her parents planted an oak tree in her memory, at a spot, overlooking the football field, where her mother would drop her off for school. On graduation day, her classmates paused for a moment of silence at Merrill Auditorium before her parents accepted her diploma.
Kevin Crocker said it wasn’t until later, when his insurance company told him it would need a cause of death before processing his claim, that he and his wife began to wonder what was taking so long. In August, as many of his daughter’s classmates prepared to go to college, he finally called the Medical Examiner’s Office.
And, still, the examiners had no answers for him.
The delay was not the fault of those working in the Medical Examiner’s Office, which receives between 2,200 and 2,300 calls to investigate causes of death each year. The office accepts approximately 1,400 of those cases and performs between 350 and 400 autopsies per year.
The state has had only one medical examiner, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Margaret Greenwald, since the departure in October of Dr. Michael Ferenc. The administrator at the medical examiner’s office, Jim Ferland, told a reporter for the American Journal the state would hire another medical examiner later this month. Even with an additional medical examiner, however, such a large workload could easily overwhelm two people.
In fact, waits like the one Kevin Crocker and Sandra Phillips just endured are not uncommon, according to Ferland. The state needs to figure out how to shorten the waits for families, whether that requires hiring another medical examiner or more staff to support them.
It’s important to make sure the results are accurate, but it’s also important to make sure families don’t spend half a year waiting to find out what happened to their loved ones.
Kevin Crocker and Sandra Phillips waited five months to find out their daughter died of a heart ailment she was diagnosed with when she was 13 years old. Then and only then could they start coming to terms with her death, to focus on the memories and not the questions.
One of Alanna Phillips-Crocker’s classmates, Jenna Dorr, shared one with an American Journal reporter shortly after her death. Dorr recalled a time when she had gone on a walk to get ice cream with her friend. Phillips-Crocker stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk because of a spontaneous urge to dance – something she was known for doing.
But because she wanted to waltz, she needed a partner. Dorr obliged, and the two waltzed there on the sidewalk.
“Alanna was definitely a free spirit,” said Dorr. “She loved to dance a lot. That’s probably how I’ll remember her.”
Brendan Moran, editor
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