KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — A new, larger building is one step closer to housing the Knox County Regional Forensic Center, with state and local officials dedicating the building on Tuesday.
In addition to unveiling the new center, officials surprised Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Darinka Mileusnic during the event, revealing that the new Knox County Regional Forensic Center was named in her honor.
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“The name of the facilities just took me absolutely by surprise. I would cry every time I think about it,” Mileusnic said. “Coming here and just spending more than two decades, I always said, this community deserves the best. And there were some issues. Anyone looking at any old kind of remote history of the medical examiner system in Tennessee and especially East Tennessee can find those stories.”
She continued, “when I became aware of those issues and stories from the past, I kind of felt the urge that I needed to do more and better because I said, ‘this is a great community. This is a great part of Tennessee. This is a great part of the country. These people, these citizens deserve better and more and I’m going to be here to deliver it.’”
Remembering the past, Mileusnic explained that the Knox County Regional Forensic Center’s history really began back in the 1990s, when Dr. Bill Bass helped to establish the first forensic center on the ground floor of the University of Tennessee Medical Center. In the beginning, Mileusnic was part of that small team, which only had two full-time technicians, a forensic pathologist, a secretary, an administrator, and one new medicolegal death investigator. Then, in 2008, Mileusnic became the acting chief in the same year that the forensic center became the medical examiner for Anderson County…