DALLAS – Dallas County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jeffrey Barnard is retiring after 37 years with the county, 33 of those years at the helm of its Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences.
Barnard says as a young medical student, this isn’t the career he imagined. An internship in the basement morgue of Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital, though, piqued his interest.
“It was total chaos, but they let me do stuff I would never let a resident do,” he said.
Figuring out how and why people died was like solving a mystery.
“It’s a puzzle. You know, as a kid, I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles. And you know, you get little pieces of information and you put a picture together,” he said.
When Barnard moved to Dallas County in 1987, he was one of just four medical examiners performing 2,000 autopsies a year on the old Parkland Hospital campus. Technology wasn’t what it is today.
“Well, I mean, there was no DNA lab,” Barnard said.