If someone dies under unclear circumstances, William Young III gets the call.

As Butler County coroner, it is his job to determine the cause and manner of someone’s death.

“Every case is a homicide until you prove different. You have to challenge everything,” said Young, 54, of Clay Township, who has been coroner since 2000.

His office gets about 1,200 calls per year. He gets called to any home death, any hospital death within 24 hours of being admitted, any death in an operating room, emergency room and hospital lab, among other cases.

Additionally, any body set to be cremated has to be approved by the coroner’s office since the mid-1990s.

“It used to be a pretty open thing,” Young said.

Of his 1,200 calls a year, he said about 750 are for cremations.

On the occasions he gets called to crime scenes, most of the time he does not get there too quickly because investigators still are working near the body.

“It might be two or three hours,” Young said.

Sometimes, he goes in and quickly pronounces the person has died and then gets out of the way until investigators are ready for him. Then he carefully moves the body while either he or police take photographs.

The coroner’s office stores bodies and does autopsies at the Young Funeral Home. Young said his office has two or three pathologists who it calls to do autopsies.

Autopsies have to be done for any suspected suicide, any death in the Butler County Prison, any death where drugs are suspected and deaths of younger people where an obvious cause is not apparent.

He said the responsibility for notifying family members about a death sometimes falls on the coroner’s office, but he said the police mostly do it.

Following an autopsy, a determination of the cause and manner of death is made and a funeral home is called to handle arrangements.

The possible manners of death are natural causes, suicide, homicide, accidental and undetermined. Causes could be anything from blunt force trauma in car crashes, gunshot wounds in homicides or suicides and heart attack or stroke for natural causes.

Young has never testified in court. He said the pathologist or police officers have the best answers for questions that prosecutors or attorneys might ask.

Dealing with cases of extreme decomposition, where bodies are discovered after long periods of time, are among the most difficult. He said there is no way to really determine a cause of death in these cases because the body is in extremely poor condition.

“(That’s) the worst of them all,” Young said, saying he has seen cases where weather conditions have left bodies mummified.

In some cases, he said the flies present around the body can give a lot of information. If maggots near cocoons are observed, he said that means a body has been dead for about eight days.

Young noted cases involving children are among his hardest to deal with.

A major problem his office has, Young said, is with indigent cases.

He said some people in nursing homes die and their children do not want anything to do with them, leaving them indigent. He also said some people who were released from state hospitals when they closed often do not have any paperwork, making it difficult to track down next of kin.

In these cases, Young stores the bodies for 30 days while searching for next of kin. If they cannot find any relatives, the body is sent for cremation.

Coroners are required to take a basic education course shortly after they are elected and then pass a test. Additionally, coroners have to take eight hours of continuing education courses every year. Deputy coroners also have this requirement.

Young said coroners should know about anatomy, pathology, biology and other similar subjects.

“You’ve got to know how the system runs,” Young said.

The job, which is elected, is considered part time. Young’s two deputy coroners also are part-time. The only full-time worker is the office’s secretary.

Although part time, he said he considers the nature of the job as similar to that of a police officer, firefighter or EMT.

“It’s the same deal; you’re waiting on the call,” Young said.

If there is a major tragedy in one of the seven surrounding counties, he said he and other nearby coroners respond to help.

He said among the most stressful aspects of the job is that as soon as he is going to do something else, he gets a call. Additionally, he said it seems the office gets many calls when he goes on vacation.

“It’s just weird how things run like that,” Young said.

Married with two stepdaughters, he said this kind of schedule can be a challenge.

“You really can’t make any plans in this job,” Young said.

His father, William F. “Digger” Young Jr., was the coroner from 1970 to 1999. He recalled responding to a call with his father in the early 1970s, when he was 10 or 11 years old.

“I’ve been into it for a lifetime,” Young said.

He started college at Butler County Community College before going to the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science in the late 1980s. Before replacing his father, he was a deputy coroner.

He said the use of technology has increased over the years. When he started, he noted coroners and deputies were trained to use cameras with 35 mm film. Now, digital cameras are used.

Currently, all coroner’s files are on paper.

“We’re trying to go (digital),” Young said.

He has boxes of files in his office. There are files with envelopes that have the name of the deceased and the cause of death.

In addition to his job as coroner, Young is a funeral director for the Young Funeral Home in Butler and he is a caretaker at three cemeteries.