Some places make politics seem pretty petty.
Behind the entry to the Arapahoe County coroner’s office, past the waiting area and autopsy lab, a wall of shelves stores hundreds of clear plastic containers. In them, soaked in preservatives, are organ samples from people who’ve died this year in violent or suspicious ways.
This is the work of Mike Dober sen, who twice has switched parties as the county’s well-respected coroner.
He was a microbiologist researching MS when he headed to med school at age 36 to become a forensic pathologist. “I used to watch a lot of ‘Quincy,’ ” he says.
Eight years later, he had a family to support when the elected coroner resigned. County officials filling her vacancy told him he needed to be a Republican, he says.
The lifelong Democrat from a family of Ohio steel workers switched his party and got the job. Given the nonpartisan nature of the work, it seemed like a small concession.
Dobersen, now 61, is known for his meticulousness and disinterest in county political dramas. He has earned the respect of the law enforcement and legal communities, whose members say he’s a straight- shooter and fierce advocate for the dignity of his patients.
Many — including the uninsured dad who dropped dead from untreated heart disease — fell through the cracks.
Some — such as the 12-year-old who broke her brain car surfing — made bad choices.
Others — like the baby who choked on a ramen noodle — had unspeakably bad luck.
It’s both a weight and a privilege to be “a family physician to the bereaved,” as he puts it.
That load grew heavy as a volunteer at the World Trade Center site. It grew heavier during his stint in a morgue after Hurricane Katrina. Disgusted during the Bush years, he switched back to being a Democrat.
“I know some of the people on our side were miffed that he changed parties,” says Dave Kerber, Arapahoe County Republican Party chairman.
So miffed that in a scramble to field a coroner candidate this year, party activists persuaded a former lawyer for a Texas televangelist to oppose Dobersen. Jay Ledbetter, 59, says he was approached to run in the hour before District Attorney Carol Chambers nominated him officially at the county assembly.
Ledbetter touts that his work as a former assistant prosecutor will “bring legal balance” to the job, whatever that means. He worked as general counsel for Zola Levitt, a Messianic minister. His medical experience, he says, amounts to volunteering as an untrained medic in the Army’s special ops.
In a speech after his quickie nomination, he told his party he looked forward to the autopsies of Democrats.
“Goodness me, it was a silly joke told for a partisan audience,” he says.
“I found it to be extraordinarily inappropriate,” counters Sheriff Grayson Robinson, a Republican.
Despite his remarkably strong stomach, Dobersen looks sick when discussing the possibility of losing his job to a man he suspects of “never having set foot in a coroner’s office.”
(Ledbetter says that he has — and has witnessed an autopsy too — yet can’t remember in which state or why.)
Out of respect for the 2,500 deaths investigated each year by the county, Ledbetter’s candidacy is no laughing matter. And in the names of the 500 bodies autopsied there annually, let it be said that a coroner’s campaign schemed out of partisan spite is a sick joke.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
