(ProPublica) – “If you don’t look, you’re not going to find,” said Lauri McGivern, medicolegal death investigator coordinator in Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, chair of the National Association of Medical Examiners’ medicolegal death investigation committee and past president of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators. “We need to know why infants are dying.”

But nothing in Idaho law says an elected county coroner must follow any national standards for death investigations. So, many of them don’t. A child who dies unexpectedly or outside of a doctor’s care in Idaho is less likely to be autopsied than anywhere else in the United States. In the case of baby Onyxx, without a word to Alexis or Diamond, Bonneville County coroner Rick Taylor simply decided the death was an unsolvable mystery. (Read More)