Life lessons from Dr. Leon Kelly, El Paso County's retiring coroner
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Dr. Leon Kelly’s nighttime routine includes a nightly message from work: a text detailing the count and manner of death of the deceased in any of 20 Colorado counties Kelly serves as chief medical examiner.
The text serves as prep for the next day’s workload:
“35 year-old, motorcycle accident… 50 year-old found dead in bed, multiple gunshot wounds… 43 year-old, fentanyl found nearby…”
Kelly, the coroner for El Paso County, admitted that it’s not the most pleasant text to receive before bed, but after 17 years working in forensic pathology, he has learned to compartmentalize his emotions long enough to get a needed night’s sleep.
“There’s no surprise that at the coroner’s office, there’s no happy endings, right? Nobody’s saved,” said Kelly. “But out of figuring out what happened and what went wrong, there’s healing and hope and change that comes from it. And there’s an incredible amount of meaning and purpose and satisfaction in that.”
Kelly began working as the deputy chief medical examiner in the El Paso County Coroner’s Office before rising to chief medical examiner and coroner in 2018. He recently announced that he will be retiring at the end of this year.
Colorado has a complicated coroner system with rules that differ by county. In most counties, coroners are elected by voters, including El Paso County where Kelly serves.
Many Colorado coroners are not even forensic pathologists upon election, but they’re required to undergo death investigation training.
Kelly serves as both coroner and chief medical examiner, which is why his job includes conducting autopsies himself while also fulfilling a number of administrative and managerial responsibilities such as record-keeping, external and internal communications and overseeing a team of forensic pathologists who assist with autopsies.
In contrast to El Paso County, Denver County does not have a coroner, but instead a medical examiner’s office, where a city-appointed chief medical examiner oversees a team of forensic pathologists.
Kelly, 48, grew up in Indiana with a slightly different — yet to some, maybe equally as intimidating — medical aspiration: dentistry.
He described the research during medical school as “mind numbing,” and shifted his path to surgery. During his pathology residency, Kelly participated in a specialized forensic pathology fellowship at the Penrose-St. Francis hospital in Colorado Springs that changed the course of his career.
Within 20 minutes of doing forensics, he was hooked.
“I needed to feel like I was making a difference in the moment, and [forensic pathology] was the most immediate jolt of purpose that I had experienced,” he said.
The information Kelly and his team gather and deliver through autopsies may appear in a number of different settings, ranging from death reports to official testimony in criminal court cases.
On a more human level, Kelly is responsible for communicating the cause of death with victim’s families, which he said is one of the more difficult parts of the job, as well as one of the most important.
“You turn doubts and questions and uncertainty into answers, which really is, for every family, the first step towards healing,” said Kelly.
“You can’t heal unless you have the answers that you need to put your mind to rest.”
Kelly described his job as occupying a very singular position at the cross-section of police and emergency services, criminology, media relations and psychiatry.
These instances hit particularly hard when a victim seems in any way similar to loved ones of his own.
“Maybe the kid is the same age as my kid, or maybe the death reminded me of my mom’s death, or a hiker was hiking on a trail that I’ve hiked, and he fell and got killed,” said Kelly, a father of 15 and 13-year-old kids.
“I would love to say I just walk out the door and it doesn’t bother me. But this is just not true. You can’t do this every day and not have it impact you.”
Once he comes to a conclusion about a cause of death in a particular case, the technical part of the job is over, and Kelly must switch back on his emotions to appropriately sympathize and empathize with the public.
It’s this emotional trauma, matched with sometimes low pay and limited educational and training resources, that has contributed to a national shortage of forensic pathologists.
A 2022 Time report found that there are about half as many working full-time forensic pathologists as are needed. Rural areas are particularly underserved due to low funding, understaffed offices and limited tools and technology.
But Kelly was drawn to the field’s intertwining of the biology, psychology and sociology required to solve each forensic mystery.
He also enjoys being the calm amid the chaos.
“There’s an immense satisfaction walking into a room full of the worst things imaginable, things that would destroy most people, that would be the most tragic thing that they’ve ever experienced, and to me, it’s just a Tuesday,” said Kelly, who sometimes is called to visit the scenes of crimes and accidents.
As with many in death-related or potentially traumatizing professions, one must learn the “forensic pathologist’s superpower: compartmentalization,” according to Kelly.
Through his years with the El Paso County Coroner’s office, Kelly has learned to remove the distraction of emotion when investigating a crime scene or conducting autopsies.
He said he brings a “suck it up and do your job” philosophy to each case, in the same way that one might hope a surgeon would get busy stitching instead of sharing their sympathy and best wishes.
“If a surgeon showed up and was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so sad, are you OK?’ You’d respond, ‘Like, I’m dying here, dude, do your job!’” said Kelly, laughing.
The El Paso County Coroner’s office, where Kelly is based, serves 20 counties in Southern Colorado. Most counties in the state do not have any forensic pathologists, said Kelly, so he and his team of about five full-time forensic pathologists, a handful of part-time pathologists and in-house toxicologists, conduct autopsies to support offices from miles around.
On average, Kelly’s office conducts between four and five autopsies a day. The team works six days a week (no autopsies on Sunday), which means the number of autopsies on Mondays can sometimes reach double digits.
Because the El Paso County Coroner’s office studies deaths occurring in about one-third of Colorado counties, Kelly said he has studied as many as 17 bodies in one day.
Throughout his tenure, Kelly oversaw pathology investigations into the COVID-19 pandemic (nearly 2,000 people have died from COVID-19 in El Paso County since the beginning of the pandemic, one of the highest per-county rates in the state), the Club Q shooting and the recent Return to Nature incident where approximately 190 decaying corpses were discovered at a Colorado Springs funeral home.
On a larger scale, Kelly has seen first-hand the fatal effects of the worsening opioid crisis and mental health crisis.
A box labeled “2024 Fentanyl Pills” in the evidence room adjoining the morgue contains baggies with lethal amounts of small blue tablets.
Crowding the floor are boxes brimming with bagged medication jars that the office removes from the homes of the deceased. They have filled about ten small buckets since June of this year alone.
A red tub standing about three feet tall contains loose letters –– death notes –– each of which Kelly has read through at least once. The tub fills up every few years, he said.
“You hear the thoughts and prayers for law enforcement and first responders, and that’s awesome, they’re really important,” he said. “But nobody ever, ever thinks of what the coroner or medical examiner is doing.”
“You forget that every one of those people at, like, the Club Q shooting, are brought here, and somebody is identifying them and somebody is communicating with their families. It’s difficult work.”
But Kelly underlined that he and his team don’t do the job for accolades or attention. They perform autopsies to help better inform professionals and the public about serious trends that may be afflicting communities, such as the opioid or mental health crises.
Kelly said that the work done at the Coroner’s office contributes to the overall progress of community health development, and he has taken his efforts beyond the morgue as well.
He co-founded the El Paso County Child Fatality Review Team, which investigates cases of child abuse, neglect and fatalities. He served as the board chair on the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to spread awareness about teen and adult mental health, and helped lead the Teen Suicide Prevention Task Force.
El Paso County has struggled with suicide, particularly youth suicide, in the past few years, according to data from Children’s Hospital Colorado. In 2023, 16 youth suicides were recorded, and an estimated 5.5% of high schoolers attempted to commit suicide.
Kelly grew up frequently neglected by a mother with mental health issues, and he saw his position as chief medical officer as a way to not only investigate cold evidence of the negative impacts of child neglect, but as a way to inspire change in the community.
“We don’t do autopsies for the dead. We do them for the living,” said Kelly.
“[We don’t get better] from sticking your head in the sand and pretending like these things aren’t happening. We get better because we delve deep into what happened, and then we apply that knowledge to ways in which we can make our life better.”
Kelly was elected as the El Paso County Coroner in 2018. After he steps down at the end of this year, the Colorado Springs County Commissioners will appoint a temporary replacement before elections are held again in 2026.
In his retirement, Kelly hopes to serve as a teacher and a mentor to the next generation of forensic pathologists. He will be teaching at Rocky Vista University and will continue advocating for increased support around pathology, particularly in underserved rural areas across Colorado.
Kelly added that he will be taking some more time to enjoy personal hobbies as well, including a long-held passion for films –– specifically, horror films.
He and his friend, another forensic pathologist, founded and host the 6 Feet Under Film Festival, a horror-themed fest that also hosts monthly screenings at the RoadHouse theater in Colorado Springs.
“I realize the irony of two forensic pathologists running a horror festival since we spend so much of our day surrounded by horror, but obviously it’s a very different environment,” he said.
”It’s a way to engage and unload what we do every day in a safe, fun, creative way.”
Working in forensics has heightened and dampened his enjoyment of some films. Kelly said he has been impressed by the accuracy of some movie violence, while others, like mass-death zombie movies, make him instinctively think, “Man, this would take days to clean up.”
He is currently working on his own horror screenplay which he hopes to produce in Colorado Springs. While the script is still in progress, the horror/thriller “Devil in the Trunk” follows a young woman with a devil in her car trunk being pursued by a law enforcement officer from a town that doesn’t exist, a Tarantino-meets-70’s muscle car low-budget indie film, according to Kelly.
Through his time as a medical examiner, Kelly now much more acutely recognizes the importance of spending time on hobbies like these with friends and family.
“When every single day of your life is about death, it certainly changes your perspective on how you should live your life,” he said.
Kelly said that much of what he sees people spending time arguing or worrying about seem quite trivial compared to the circumstances he experiences daily.
He does not, and will never smoke nor drink, and he has sworn off riding motorcycles as well, based on what he has witnessed.
Kelly admitted that his realizations may be cliché, but he is very aware of how quickly life may be lost, often without any warning or expectation.
“You don’t get many of these seconds,” said Kelly. “They tick away pretty quickly, and they can be gone in a moment.
“So make the most of them.”