Re-elect Alexander Krieg for Lake County Coroner.
Five years of experience, service, and progress.
Why should you vote for me, and what will I do if I win?
I’m not done building the Lake County Coroner’s Office. I want to bring our morgue into full compliance with national standards. I want to continue to secure grants to reduce the tax burden on our county’s taxpayers. Our standard operating procedures are now compliant with other agencies in the state, but I want to continue to refine them. I want to expand our capabilities to bring you the answers you want when the worst happens.
There are some jobs you can grow into. This is not one of them. We have been here before. The Coroner’s Office has made immense progress since I began this work, but we are not finished, and what we have finished isn’t permanent. An untrained and inexperienced coroner learns their trade on the job. Lake County can’t afford those sorts of mistakes.
Re-elect me so I can finish the job for Lake County.
What does a coroner actually do?
Most folks in town will never have a reason to think about the Coroner’s Office. For all of you who have, I have shared in your loss over the past five years. Let me explain the duties of a coroner on a personal level and a technical level.
This is what being a coroner means to me: I tell the stories of the dead. When someone you love dies under any circumstance that isn’t clear, someone must investigate, and someone must give you answers.
That someone is me. Fundamentally, I work for the person who is dead, the person on the ground, or in the wrecked vehicle, for example. I am here to tell their story. Nobody is more helpless than a dead person, and I owe it to them to tell their story as impartially and completely as possible. I advocate for someone who can never again advocate for themselves. Whatever I learn, I bring to the ones who loved them. I tell you how the one you loved died. This work is deeply meaningful to me.
We are a strictly independent, duly elected government office. We investigate any death that isn’t a natural death under the care of a physician, independently of, but in cooperation with, law enforcement. The office is governed by CRS 30-10-606. We determine cause and manner of death. Cause means the actual reason someone died. Manner can be natural, accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined.
Our independence from other agencies, including hospice, healthcare agencies, and other companies, is not a flaw of our office, it is how the system is meant to work. A coroner who coordinates with home healthcare, hospice, or funeral homes runs a referral service, not a governmental forensic service.
What does our work entail?
- We perform wound analysis for suicides, homicides, or accidents, and interpretation and tracing of wounds at autopsy.
- We search for and recover scattered or disturbed human remains or excavate them from clandestine graves.
- We perform and interpret toxicology, a critical task for fighting the opioid epidemic that is currently ravaging Lake County.
- We work with anthropologists and a whole cast of forensic specialists, from experts in lakes and rivers, to experts in insects and decomposition. We also work with law enforcement, EMS, and search and rescue.
- If the worst happens, and there is a mass casualty incident, such as a bus or plane crash, or wildfire involving a populated area, we are the ones who put remains back together and determine what remains return to which family.
- If we have another pandemic, we track the deaths and the spread with the Public Health Department.
- I notify families of the death of loved ones. This is the hardest part of the job.
About me
I am certified by the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators (ABMDI) as a Diplomate member. That is the national board that certifies coroners, and that is their highest level of certification. I am also a certified death investigator through the Colorado Coroners’ Association (CCA). I’m proud to be a certified EMT, training I received right here in Leadville.
I have attended many hundreds of autopsies and have received training and certification as an autopsy technician. I have worked many homicides, accidents, overdoses, and natural deaths. From an academic standpoint, I study ballistics and gunshot wounds. My specialty is water deaths, an interest tracing back many years to my background as a technical diver assisting in body recoveries. I’ve trained other coroners, have been asked to testify for cases, and I bring to the office the experience and professionalism that only an experienced and trained investigator can. I’m especially proud that I have built a working partnership with Donor Alliance for facilitating organ transplants locally and nationwide, for those times when the deceased and their families have chosen to give life to others.
Before this, I went to college and then worked in the trades. I was a diesel mechanic and a trucker, but I always remained involved in emergency services, from Lake County Search and Rescue to wildland fire training. I was sworn into this office wearing Carhartts, and I am ferociously proud of my working-class, blue-collar background. On a personal level, I’ve lived here since 2015. My hobby is bodybuilding. You can find me in Altitudes Gym, come say hey if you see me there.
What I’m not
I’m not a funeral director. I remain independent of any industry that profits from death. I do not work for, contract with, or have financial connections to any hospice, home healthcare agency, mortuary, or funeral home. I never have, and I never will.
This is not merely my personal view on what is right. It is what is structurally required of this office for us to maintain our impartiality, because that is what is necessary for telling the stories of the dead.
You have already paid for this office with your tax dollars, and I have nothing to sell you.
What I’ve achieved
- No records of any kind.
- No transport vehicle.
- No facility.
- No supplies (I didn’t even have gloves).
- No forensic pathologist was willing to work with Lake County.
- An awful statewide reputation, leading to almost total isolation.
- Nationally accredited and staffed with certified death investigators.
- A transport vehicle and good equipment.
- A morgue under active development, which will achieve certification to national standards.
- Earned grants of nearly $50,000 for toxicology and suicide prevention efforts.
- One of the fastest response times in the state, freeing up other first responders for critical, life-saving tasks.
- Expanded scope of service to include deaths in home healthcare and hospice, when asked by families to attend.
- Uniforms, tools, cameras, case management and records systems, phones, and all the other things we need to do this job properly.
- Written standard operating procedures (SOPs), written by me.
- Working relationships with every relevant emergency service, local and statewide.
- Partnerships with nationally renowned forensic experts.
- Vastly expanded capabilities and knowledge, from ballistics and drownings, to child deaths and other specialized fields.
I am proud of the fact that other agencies now come to us for forensic consultation. That alone, as a measure of change, is a great success. None of this happened by accident; this is the product of the efforts of myself and our team, and it is the product of specific training and specific experience. It wasn’t simply a job description, but an entire system that we had to develop mostly from scratch.
A note on AIEvery word on this website was written by my hands, human hands. If a candidate for office has an AI write his or her website, ask yourself how they’ll respond to your emails.
A note about the stickerWin or lose, I thought you should have a cool sticker.