Will County begins digging for new morgue

The county morgue may not be the most popular government service, but the need for the new space is urgent, Will County Coroner Laurie Summers said Friday at a groundbreaking.

The ceremony marked the start of construction for what likely is the last of new facilities built at the Will County complex along Laraway Road in Joliet.

“We needed the update,” Summers said after the groundbreaking. “The whole county needed to be updated. We’re kind of the people nobody wants to talk about.”

The morgue is expected to open in summer 2023 and is being built next to the county Public Safety Complex, a modern facility that replaced the old sheriff’s Laraway station consolidating county police operations and creating new 911 dispatch services. Other buildings constructed in the area between Manhattan and Cherry Hill roads provided new space for the county’s animal control services and Emergency Management Agency.

The morgue likely is to be the last new building because there is little space left, county officials said.

The county morgue has been operating on Caton Farm Road in Crest Hill in what has been designated a temporary facility since it was first used 20 years ago.

“We’re running out of room,” Summers said. “Our cooler is most of the time full to capacity.”

A cooler keeps bodies cold for autopsies. A freezer preserves bodies for as long as two months.

When the new morgue is open, the county will expand its cooling capacity from 14 bodies to 49. Freezing capacity will be expanded from five bodies to 25.

The morgue, which will be 11,460-square feet in size and cost $10.3 million to build, is being built for the future.

Not only is the county growing, but it’s aging, too, leading to dramatic increases in the case load for the county coroner, Summers said. A growing rate of drug overdoses also is contributing to higher death counts in Will County.

“We’ve got to build this for 30 to 40 years out,” Summers said. “We’ve got one chance to get it right. We’ve got to do it now.”

Space was an issue 20 years ago when the morgue was moved out of its previous quarters in the old Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet. While the so-called temporary morgue is in Crest Hill, the coroner’s administrative offices are in downtown Joliet. The new building consolidates all coroner operations in one place.

The coroner doesn’t just pick up bodies at crime scenes, an impression that Summers believes the public has from TV crime dramas. Every death in the county is in some way handled by the coroner’s office, she said. Not all bodies come to the morgue, but the coroner does review all deaths in some fashion to confirm the manner of death.

For those bodies that do come to the morgue, the new facility should offer a better environment for families going through a terrible experience, county officials said.

County Board Speaker Mimi Cowan talked at the ceremony about how Summers brought County Board members to the temporary morgue to show first hand why a new morgue was needed as she pushed for the facility.

“She saw the need for better services for our residents in some of their darkest hours,” Cowan said. “She said we need to do something different.”