Horry County Coroner moves to new building after he was running out of room for bodies

CONWAY, SC (WBTW) – For nearly two years, we’ve been telling you Horry County Coroner Robert Edge says he was running out of room to store bodies.

Back in April, Coroner Robert Edge showed us around his old office for the second time asking for help because he was running out of room.

He said they were storing cremains in a small closet, but he just moved into a new building three times bigger with more office space for sensitive calls his office has to make.

“There are a lot of regulations that you have to watch, and one of them is Hipaa regulations, and the offices will be where they can bring a family in and talk to them and you don’t have to worry about somebody in the lobby overhearing what you are talking about. Sometimes it’s sensitive information,” said Edge.

There’s also more storage room for cremains, and thanks to a new cooler, Edge won’t have to turn to area funeral homes for help storing bodies.

Edge says the new cooler can hold about 25 bodies, and that could help him prepare any kind of major emergency in Horry County he wouldn’t have been prepared for in the old building.

“You watch the news and you see where there are mass shootings or there are fires where five or six, ten people pass away in a fire, and if we had had that to occur before today, we would have had a problem on having a place to put the remains at least until we could get them autopsied and families notified and things like that,” said Edge.

Edge says part of the reason they were running out of room in the old building was because of the increase in bodies from the heroin epidemic, and he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon.

“A lot of the bodies that we had talked about in the past were either unclaimed bodies or were unclaimed bodies that we could not find families for and some of those were heroin deaths. It’s a shame you’re trying to find people and you can’t find them sometimes,” said Edge.

Edge says he is already looking at new challenges facing his office.

Each year, he says they have an increase of about 150 calls they have to respond to thanks to growth in Horry County, and with only four deputies, adding more people may be his next big obstacle.