I was a Medical Investigator in the Office of Chief Medical Examiner [OCME] in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s under CMEs Milton Helpern, Dominick Di Maio, and Michael Baden. Before the "morgue wagon" responded to a DOA to pick up the body and bring it to 520 First Avenue in Manhattan (the location of the OCME) or to the county mortuary ("morgue," located for example, at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn), a Medical Investigator first responded to the scene of death if the case was reported by the NYPD to the OCME and the OCME clerk on call determined that the death was a "medical examiner's case" (death under suspicious circumstances or when not attended by a physician within 30 days and certain other criteria). The Medical Investigator examined the body, assessed the circumstances of the death, and either ordered the body to the mortuary or issued a death certificate at the scene. Medical Investigators at that time were all physicians, but I believe that lay investigators may now be used. New York City uses a medical examiner system; it does NOT use a "coroner" system. Coroners may be physicians but are often laymen (such as funeral directors). Anyway, since this is a radio forum, you may be interested to know some of the history behind the dispatching of Medical Investigators to the scene of death before the morgue wagon was called and responded. I legislated vigorously in the early 1970s for a radio dispatch system for Medical Investigators on call in Manhattan. The only notification system at that time was street pay phone, most of which did not work (this was long before cellular phones were available). It was not uncommon to have a DOA in lower Manhattan with another a few blocks away, but, with no radio notification, the Medical Investigator often drove way uptown to another DOA, only to have to go back downtown, wasting precious time and leading to many complaints about the slow response. I was able to get the OCME to install a transmitter/receiver at 520 First Avenue that was on the "Hospital Base" frequency -- at that time this was a low band VHF frequency somewhere in the 39 MHz range. It was connected the main radio via landline. Unfortunately, the OCME clerks were reluctant to use the radio at 520 First Avenue to call the Medical Investigator because they felt that, to do this, they should be upgraded in salary to radio technicians (believe it!!). In addition, the OCME borrowed its only Manhattan tour car with a radio (an old GE transceiver) from the Health and Hospitals Corporation or the Department of Health (I can't remember which one ran the show back then), so even if the on-duty clerk was willing to use the radio, there was often no radio in the tour car (and certainly none in the Medical Investigator's personal automobile, which was often used). I'm sure that the use of cellular phones now precludes the need for radio dispatching of Medical Investigators to the scenes of death. Actually, since some DOAs were "sensitive," I'm not sure that unscrambled radio transmissions were the best way to notify Medical Investigators to respond. Anyway, I thought you'd find this bit of history interesting.