There’s No Eating at the Morgue

My lifelong fascination with death led me to tour the L.A. coroner’s office soon after I nearly died myself. And it’s not exactly as pristine as the ones on TV.

Jan 18, 2024

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*In a lifetime far, far away, I was a hustling freelance journalist who wrote for the top rags in the country. I’ve been fascinated and preoccupied with death, even before my near-death experience where I was hit by an SUV and dragged 50 feet across the cement. This is my experience visiting the Los Angeles morgue in 2007. This is not for the faint of heart.

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“Can you still take me to the morgue?” I asked John Zambos, a homicide detective from one of Los Angeles’s most crime-ridden areas. A few years earlier I befriended Zambos, who has since retired from duty, while I was working as an associate producer on a TV documentary for September Films for a show called Vice. This particular segment focused on the brave souls who clean up the blood and guts from homicides and suicides.

Zambos, who stands tall at six-foot-three, had promised to take me to the morgue six months earlier, but then I almost died myself while navigating a crosswalk at Melrose Avenue. A Ford Explorer struck me at 35 miles an hour, dragging me 49 feet before finally stopping. I broke six ribs, my L1 vertebra, and my tailbone, and fractured my left femur bone—for that, I was outfitted with a 14-inch-long titanium rod. Four years later, I removed it from my body.

Three and a half months into my recovery, the detective called me. I was still limping badly and spending most of my time between physiotherapy and doctor appointments. It turned out that he was going to check on a body for a case later that day.

“Really? Can I come?”

“Sure, I mean it’s Wednesday after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you ever watch the Mickey Mouse Club? It’s ‘Anything Can Happen Wednesday.’ I’ll pick you up. It will be good for you to get out of the house.”

Yes, I thought. And what better place to visit than a morgue.

No matter who you are or what you do, there’s a chance you’ll wind up being transported to the coroner’s office if you die unexpectedly. In L.A., the Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner is mandated by law to determine the circumstances, manner, and cause of all violent, sudden, or unusual deaths occurring within the county, including all homicides, suicides, accidental deaths, and natural deaths where the decedent—or, deceased person—has not seen a physician within 20 days before death.

According to the National Association of Medical Examiners, there were a total of 18,187 deaths reported in 2013 (the most recent report available) to the coroner’s office. Of those, 8,495 were examined and 3,775 were completed autopsies.

I was 13 when I first became fascinated with death: My Sunday school friend had been fatally hit by an 18-wheeler. In college, I studied the economics of the funeral business (it’s a $20.7 billion-per-year industry), and published my first story as a journalist—when I was 18—about the rising cremation rates in Montreal, which involved spending the day with a man who burned bodies for a living, underground, in a small room with a retort that climbed to 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

I continued stoking my interest when I moved to Los Angeles, by writing for magazines on the subject, and when HBO’s Six Feet Under debuted, I made sure to get a press pass to the premiere.

So it was inevitable that I’d end up in the coroner’s office—I just couldn’t have anticipated that it would coincide with a moment in my life when I nearly died myself.

I stood in a parking lot, waiting for Detective Zambos to lead the way, when the stench hit me. I thought it was part decomposing flesh, part formaldehyde, but he insisted it was all natural: Putrefying innards emit methane that smells like rotting fish.

We entered through the back via the garage, which led to the wood-paneled administrative office, where I found two secretaries basking under the fluorescent lights, kept company by black Oscar fish swimming in a tank. There was a “No Eating” sign hanging on the wall—as if. The office was door-less. As soon as Zambos and I entered the next room—bam! Four bodies were lying on gurneys, dead and naked. Genitals engorged. Bellies bulging. Skin yellow like chicken fat and purple-y blue.

In retrospect, I expected the morgue to be pristine and sterile, all stainless steel and baby-blue tiles, like something out of an episode of CSI. Maybe there would be one corpse sitting there. But instead, it was dismal and dingy, with dead bodies all around. The place made my stomach churn and gave me the creeps. It was a miracle that the accident had not rendered me a lifeless vegetable. Maybe now I wanted to literally look at death in the face and say, “Fuck you. Not yet. Not now.”

“Welcome to the Meat House,” said a technician named Tony Brown, smiling as he rolled a corpse past us to an adjoining room.

“Follow me this way, kiddo,” Zambos said. “We have to get suited up with booties and a mask. Tuberculosis is prevalent in this city, and actually, many of the coroners here have already contracted it because it’s airborne.”

“Once you are all geared up,” said Brown, “I’m gonna be your guide on this three-hour tour.”

“Excuse me, Tony,” I said lifting my right index finger in the air and giving it a twirl. “I noticed a sign back there that says, ‘No Eating.’ Does anyone actually eat around the bodies?”

“Yes. We’re not supposed to, but people chow down here all the time. Don’t tell anyone, but I ate a cheeseburger here yesterday. And I’ll tell you something—I know this sounds funny, but a body that’s died in a fire doesn’t smell much different than barbecue chicken.”

The first room I was led to was basically a big fridge. Shelf upon shelf of crisp corpses. Bodies tagged, wrapped, and stacked.

“This here are the crypts where we keep the deceased until doctors sign them out. Transients are also kept here, your John and Jane Does. Sometimes they’re in here for years,” Brown explained.

In 2013, there were 546 unclaimed or unidentified bodies.

During a rat infestation in 2002, Brown, a marathon runner originally from Baltimore, was the guy who had to inspect and double-wrap every one of the 400 bodies in the crypts.

“It was a mess,” said Brown, a Baltimore native who ran marathons when he wasn’t working among the dead. “Rats had gnawed at the corpses. Some even defecated in there, while others gave birth inside the body cavities.”

To get to each room, we maneuvered past dead bodies on gurneys. The walls of the hallway were decorated with …

There’s No Eating at the Morgue

My lifelong fascination with death led me to tour the L.A. coroner’s office soon after I nearly died myself. And it’s not exactly as pristine as the ones on TV.

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