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SASKATOONEXPRESS - May 29-June 4 2017 - Page 1
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Volume 16, Issue 21, Week of May 29, 2017
Sask. Coroner Dr. Barry Heath publishes book about his experiences
Cam Hutchinson Saskatoon Express here were two things Dr. Barry Heath hoped he wouldn’t see when he was called to a site where a person or people had died. The retired Saskatoon coroner hoped he wouldn’t encounter someone he knew intimately. And he hoped he wouldn’t find deceased children, particularly those that had perished in a fire. During his 24-year career, Heath didn’t see the bodies of anyone he knew well. But he was at sites numerous times where children had died, including one involving a fire. Heath was called on June 28, 1990 to the scene of a burning apartment building on Avenue D South in Saskatoon. People trapped in the building were jumping off balconies into the arms of police officers, firefighters and bystanders. “It was an arson case,” Heath said. “The people who set the fire used lacquer thinner that they bought at a local hardware store to spread on the floors. Then they lit it and ran. These two kids were innocent bystanders. “With a lot of fires you read about children with matches and this certainly wasn’t the case. One was a year-and-a-half old and the other one was seven.” He said he was quite involved in the case. “Normally the coroner is there to see the bodies, make sure they get identified, make sure they get autopsied if you have to and make sure they get transported to a hospital. The coroner has control of a dead body. Police can’t touch a body; ambulance people can’t touch a body. The coroner doesn’t have to be there to do that; he can say it over the
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Dr. Barry Heath was a coroner in the province for 24 years. (Photo by Sandy Hutchinson) phone. I thought it was critical to see the situation under which they died. “They escorted me up into the building which was really tricky because we had collapsed staircases and everything else. They showed me the two bodies: the boy was on the living room floor and the infant was in the bedroom.” Heath recorded the position of the bodies and gave authorization to have them moved to St. Paul’s Hospital. He then asked for an autopsy. “We also have to write reports. ‘What did the person die of?’ Smoke inhalation was likely going to be the cause and that’s what
it was. Then you have to talk about the circumstances, so that’s where the coroner talks with the fire marshal and the police. This was an arson, so I put in my report ‘suspected murder’ because there had been no conviction yet.” There are five manners of death, Heath explained. They are natural, accidental, undetermined, suicide and murder. Heath talks about many of the hundreds and hundreds of scenes he attended in his new book, Saskatchewan Coroner. Heath became a coroner by chance in 1983 in Kindersley, where he was working as a veterinarian. The local coroner asked
him to be part of a six-person jury for an inquest into the 1982 death of a man in the oil patch. At the end of the inquest, Heath wrote seven or eight recommendations to change procedures so something like the accident wouldn’t happen again. “The coroner approached me after and said, ‘you seem to be keen on this process. Would you be interested in being a coroner?’ I said, ‘well, I don’t know anything about it to tell you the truth. ’ He said, ‘you’ll find out’ and that was kind of it. I never committed myself.” (Continued on page 7)
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