Through years of grief and gore and death, Richland County coroner tried to help

For more than 35 years — the last 20 of which Gary Watts was the elected Richland County coroner — death has been his beat.

On Monday, his last day before his retirement, Gary Watts, 64, sat in his almost empty office and reminisced about the ups and downs, the gore and the grief and how he’s dealt with life and death on a daily basis and on a scale that most people can’t begin to fathom.

“We’ve seen just about everything you can possibly think of,” said Watts, who estimates he’s investigated more than 50,000 deaths since starting with the coroner’s office in 1980, becoming deputy coroner in 1985 and finally winning election for coroner in 2000.

“Everything” sounds like a lot.

But when it comes to what Watts and his office do, it might be an understatement. The Richland County Coroner’s Office oversees the thousands of county deaths that occur every year outside hospitals, as well as some deaths inside.

Those deaths include those from car crashes and train wrecks, the homeless whose bodies were found in parks after a freeze, people killed by executions and killings at the state prison complex on Broad River Road, people killed while on foot or on bicycles or on motorcycles, husbands killed by wives, wives killed by husbands, deaths by suicide and gang killings and many, many gun deaths.

There were “whodunit deaths,” such as when Brett Parker, now serving a life sentence in state prison for killing his wife and best friend in his Irmo house, then arranged things to make it look like his friend killed his wife. It took a months-long investigation and a weeks-long jury trial to find Parker guilty of murder. There are elder abuse deaths and terrible freakish deaths, such as the Columbia firefighter working a traffic scene killed by an erratic drive on I-20.

There were the nine 2015 drowning deaths of Richland County residents caught in their cars during an early fall morning when a rare mammouth rainstorm that caused some dams to break, flooding creeks and rivers and turning everyday roads into water death traps.

There was the 2012 high speed crash when a car carrying four people — including two University of South Carolina students, one former student and another young person — slammed into a building near the State Fair Grounds at high speed. The car caught fire, the bodies were mangled and police recovered seven different identifications, so identifying the dead took much longer than usual.

A death that hit his office hard was the suicide death of one of his deputy coroners, several years ago, Watts said. The Lexington County coroner’s office handled that to avoid a conflict of interest. “That was probably our lowest point — losing someone within your organization,” he said.

Lately, there have been the COVID-19 deaths, a lot of them.

“It’s not a hoax,” said Watts, who ought to know. “It’s like the flu on steroids - especially to people with preexisting conditions or the elderly. “It’s a horrible disease.”

Watts’ office used to get close to victims’ families, even giving hugs to the grieving. But COVID-19 has caused his investigators, who are trained to be professional but show empathy too, to practice social distancing and wear masks.

The worst have been the child deaths: teen suicides, infants accidentally killed by sleeping parents who roll over on them and smother them, and others, Watts said.

Such events have spurred Watts to create programs to cut down on those deaths. Over the years, he’s done major outreaches to give parents instructions on how to position sleeping infants, and to definitely avoid sleeping with them because a drowsing adult can easily roll over and kill an infant. He and his staff have made major outreaches to teach young parents how to install safety seats correctly.

How has he dealt with all this?

In late 1999, when Watts was a deputy coroner, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, a longtime friend, had asked him to think about running for coroner against the longtime incumbent Frank Barron.

Watts didn’t want to do get into politics — South Carolina coroners have to run for office every four years — but one Sunday, his preacher gave a sermon in which he told the congregation, “Just remember, if good people don’t run for office, bad people will.”

At that time, Watts had plenty of experience. He originally had wanted to be a medic and a doctor when he started riding with Forest Acres police when he was 14. From there he worked as an EMT, a police officer and an investigator for the Richland County public defender’s office.

The coroner’s job allowed him to plant a foot in both the worlds of medicine and law enforcement. He and his staff work with medical doctors, called pathologists, who do autopsies, as well as with law officers, such as homicide detectives investigating suspicious deaths and S.C. Highway Patrol troopers investigating traffic deaths.

Watts says he’s been able to function because he believes in what he’s doing, he’s got plenty of support from his wife of 25 years, Vicky, who puts up with his being called out at all hours of the night, and he can put his emotions to one side while being in the midst of truly terrible events of death and survivors’ sorrow.

“It’s being able to compartmentalize, lock off one side of your brain — it helps you through your job, ” Watts said. And people expect the coroner’s office staff to act professionally in those situations, he said.

But when he’s back home or in the office, “Sometimes I’ve cried, I’ve cursed and yelled and screamed and asked, ‘Why do these things happen?’ I’ve actually had conversations with pastors, ‘Why does God let these things happen?’ “

Watts is now in his fourth office. He and a staff of eight full- and part-time workers tarted out in downtown Columbia in three rooms on the 4th floor of the Richland County courthouse. They then moved to a slightly larger office on Taylor Street, then to a small one-story building shared with sheriff’s departments.

Now, the coroner’s office is in a remodeled warehouse complex on Shakespeare Road off Two Notch Road — a $2.5 million building purchased and remodeled and by Watts. Now, the coroner’s office staff have plenty of room, as well as a cold storage freezer that can hold 14 bodies long-term at a temperature of 10 degrees below zero.

The number of deaths his office handles per year has risen from just over 1,700 to more than 4,700 in 2020. Coroner’s pay has risen too, from about $70,000 in 2000 to some $133,000 now.

“When I started, we didn’t go to all the deaths. EMS might call us and say, ‘I don’t see any blood and there’s no hole in them.’ They would release it to the funeral home. That was one of the first things I changed. We started responding to every call we were going to sign a death certificate on,” Watts said. “How are you going to investigate it if you don’t see the body?”

A point of pride was being accredited in 2013 by a national accrediting body and meeting professional standards in 200 different categories, he said, adding, “That was a big high point.”

Another high point: being a leader in helping modernize child death investigations in South Carolina. Now, every child death is scrutinized by a team of professions that includes social service workers, pediatricians, law enforcement, the coroner’s office and others, Watts said.

“We look not only at what happened, but what can we do to keep it from happening again,” Watts said.

Among local news media, Watts is known for being accessible and quickly providing basic information about newsworthy deaths. He also has held several inquests — public trial-like airings of shooting deaths of civilians by police officers where police officers and others have taken the stand and been questioned in detailed. His tenure has pretty much been free of scandals and controversies.

He’s conducted media days, where he brings reporters out to his offices and they do things like watch a video of an autopsy and learn about the office’s various outreaches.

Professionals who work with Watts said he’s tops.

“I wish we could clone him — he’s certainly one of the best, if not the best coroner in the state,” says Laura Hudson, executive director of the S.C. Crime Victims Networks, whose work takes her all over the state. “He always went the second and third mile. And anything he tells you, you can take to the bank.”

Longtime Richland Sheriff Lott said Watts “took the coroner’s office to a level that had never been seen before. It’s not just death scenes and investigations. He’s proactive, developing programs to try to prevent deaths. He’s brought chaplains and counselors in to help the grieving, to help ease the pain.”

Shortly before Christmas, Mayor Steve Benjamin, citing Watts’ many accomplishments, gave him a key to the city.

Watts is not leaving voluntarily. In June, he lost in the Democratic primary to Naida Rutherford, a political newcomer.

Political observers said a combination of events — including that Rutherford is African American in a year where Black voters in Richland County and across the country were energized by the Black Lives Matter movement — helped lead to Watts’ defeat. It didn’t hurt that Rutherford is the ex-wife of Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, who encouraged his base of supporters to vote for his ex-wife.

Todd Rutherford also said he found that people appreciated that Naida Rutherford is a board-certified nurse practicioner and has a master’s degree in nursing, which gives her a medical background that Watts didn’t have.

“Blacks didn’t have anything against Gary, they like Gary, but this time, with everything going on, they just wanted a Black woman in that office,” said Bernice Scott, a Democratic African American political organizer in Lower Richland County who supported Watts.

Watts, who will be taking a job as executive director of the S.C. Coroners’ Association, said the best advice he can give his successor is, “Remember, the job is not about you. It’s about what you can do for the people.”

This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 12:00 AM.