Mark A. Fajardo On July 9, 2010, the Board of Supervisors approved the appointment of Mark A. Fajardo, the Chief Forensic Pathologist at
Riverside County, as the Medical Examiner-Coroner, at an annual salary of $275,000. He formally replaced
Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, who served 2 years as the Coroner, in August 2013. Mark Fajardo resigned in March 2016. A news report indicated that "he left because it became common to have up to 50 bodies waiting to be processed and the backlog of bodies was 'nuts'. ... and toxicology tests were taking six months to complete" due to inadequate staffing. Fajardo's predecessor, Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, was re-appointed on an interim basis on April 11, 2016.
Jonathan R. Lucas Jonathan R. Lucas was appointed as the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner on July 10, 2017. Lucas announced his intent to leave DMEC in September 2022.
Odey C. Ukpo On November 4, 2022, Odey C. Ukpo, Medical Director of the Department, was sworn in as Interim Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. Ukpo is the first African American to serve as Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner since the office was established in 1850. Ukpo joined the Department in 2014 and served as a Senior Deputy Medical Examiner before being named Medical Director in June 2022. On March 7, 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appointed Odey C. Ukpo as Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. == See also ==