Dr. Ronald N. Kornblum, a nationally recognized expert on chokehold deaths who served eight years as Los Angeles County coroner until he resigned amid charges of poor management and an escalating caseload, died Tuesday at his home in La Canada-Flintridge after a long illness, his family said. He was 74.
Kornblum succeeded Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the colorful veteran coroner who was demoted in 1982 over charges of mismanagement and exploiting his office for personal gain. Kornblum improved the efficiency and professionalism of the medical examiner's office but said his job became more difficult as homicides rose countywide, pressing his department's resources to the breaking point.
He left the job in 1990 after an independent management audit found unsanitary conditions and poor oversight that allowed misconduct by some employees. When he quit, he said that he had performed the job "as responsibly as possible, in a climate of continual turmoil and upheaval."
During his tenure, Kornblum handled a number of high-profile autopsies, including those of actors William Holden, John Belushi and Natalie Wood, singer Karen Carpenter and writer Truman Capote.
He had a low-key manner and was averse to publicity, qualities that set him apart from the flamboyant Noguchi, who called himself the "coroner to the stars."
Born in Chicago on Dec. 5, 1933, Kornblum was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA who earned his medical degree in 1959 at UC San Francisco. He worked in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, as a Navy medical officer from 1960 to 1961.
When he returned from overseas, he pursued his medical residency at Santa Clara County Hospital, where he discovered that he enjoyed diagnosing illnesses more than treating them. He decided to specialize in pathology, eventually narrowing his interest to autopsies. He moonlighted for the Santa Clara County coroner's office.
In 1966, he accepted a job working under Baltimore's top forensic pathologist, Dr. Russell S. Fisher. He was Maryland's deputy chief medical examiner in 1974, when he moved to California to become Ventura County coroner.
In 1980, Noguchi hired him as Los Angeles County's chief of forensic medicine. At Noguchi's request, he began to clean house and dismissed several part-time doctors who he found lacked professionalism. He also introduced new efficiencies to cut in half a backlog of 300 to 400 bodies awaiting autopsies.
