Yakima coroner accused of taking drugs from corpses enters plea

YAKIMA — Embattled Yakima County Coroner Jim Curtice was arraigned Friday on criminal charges that he lied to the police about taking illicit drugs from dead bodies at work and snorting them in his office.

Appearing in public for the first time since September, when he went on paid leave, Curtice entered a not guilty plea in Yakima County District Court to official misconduct, false statements and evidence tampering. The gross misdemeanor charges carry a maximum sentence of a year in jail.

Police and the FBI began investigating Curtice last August after he blamed a hospital visit on someone possibly spiking his energy and workout drinks with cocaine and fentanyl. After Curtice failed a polygraph test, police said he admitted to using drugs he found on corpses and spiking his own workout drink powder to back up his original story.

Curtice was charged last month without being arrested or jailed. On Friday, Judge Brian Sanderson released him on his own recognizance under the condition that he steer clear of alcohol and nonprescribed drugs.

But pressure on the elected coroner will continue. In addition to his criminal case, Curtice — who declined an interview request after his arraignment — also faces a recall effort and scrutiny over a death in the jail.

Jail death

Hien Trung Hua’s mother filed a $50 million tort claim in October accusing Yakima County jail guards of killing her son and accusing county officials — including Curtice — of helping to cover up the circumstances of the death.

She filed the claim after Seattle Times reporting detailed how Hua was arrested during a mental health crisis and then was pepper-sprayed, shackled, struck and held prone before his heart-failure death in November 2023.

A Times story contrasted Hua’s case to the treatment Curtice received following an intoxicated scuffle with sheriff’s deputies earlier the same year: Curtice was hospitalized rather than jailed and avoided prosecution.

As coroner, Curtice was responsible for investigating Hua’s death and directing a forensic pathologist to conduct an autopsy. Curtice and pathologist Jeffrey Reynolds labeled Hua’s manner of death as “natural.”

When interviewed by The Times last summer, Reynolds said he hadn’t seen videos of Hua’s jail struggle. After watching the videos, he changed his manner-of-death determination to “negligent homicide.” Curtice declined to follow that recommendation, instead relabeling Hua’s death an “accident.”

Warned

Reynolds shared concerns about Curtice with a county official almost two years ago, before the tort claim over Hua’s death and before Curtice’s drug case, according to public records obtained by The Times last month.

After county prosecutor Joe Brusic declined to charge Curtice for kicking a sheriff’s deputy in March 2023, Reynolds sent Brusic a warning letter and an error-riddled report he described as an example of Curtice’s work.

The report on a car-crash death included apparent name and date mistakes.

“As an attorney, I’m sure you can appreciate that someday the multiple errors in this standard coroner’s report given to the family of the deceased is going to come back and bite Yakima County. If this were a criminal case, the entire contents of the report could easily be construed as doubtful,” Reynolds wrote.

Brusic declined to charge Curtice in 2023 because he said the coroner had experienced a mental health crisis. Curtice attributed the crisis to post-traumatic stress disorder, partly due to his prior work as a first responder.

In his April 2023 letter to Brusic, Reynolds said he thought the coroner should not continue working in a job likely to aggravate his PTSD.

“Yakima County has been clearly warned,” the pathologist wrote.

Next steps

The city prosecutor for Ellensburg is handling Curtice’s criminal case to avoid any conflict of interest for Brusic; Curtice contacted Brusic after the August hospital visit that led to his criminal case, making Brusic a potential witness.

Curtice’s next court date is March 27. Although most Yakima County officials have called on him to resign, he’s an independently elected official, so the only way he can be removed is by voters in a regular or recall election.

Three Yakima County GOP precinct committee officers are leading the effort to recall Curtice, a two-term Republican most recently elected in 2022.

Besides accusing Curtice of taking drugs from corpses and lying about it, their recall charges say he often slept at his desk and filed erroneous reports. Their ballot synopsis won approval from a judge last month, cleaning the way to collect petition signatures. They’ll need about 13,500 to get on a ballot.

Reynolds and Chief Deputy Coroner Marshall Slight have said they’ll quit if Curtice returns to work. When Curtice initially told police he thought he’d been drugged and they asked whom he suspected, he mentioned Slight.

“Due to his recent actions, I can no longer feel safe working with Jim,” Slight later wrote in a letter to the county’s human resources department.