Current deputy, nurse practitioner seek seat
When Okanogan County voters choose the next coroner in the November elections, they will need to decide what type of experience matters most.
Gene Davis of Mallott retired from law enforcement in 2023 after 28 years — most of that time with the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office — to work under outgoing Coroner Dave Rodriguez as his chief deputy. Their primary function is to determine the cause and manner of deaths that occur outside a medical setting.
Cindy Jensen, who runs a clinic in Oroville, has worked in healthcare for the past 37 years, as a registered nurse and nurse practitioner.
It’s a choice between Rodriguez’s preferred successor and a health professional who said the next coroner should not be a former sheriff’s official, like Rodriguez and Davis.
It’s also a choice between a Republican in Davis and an independent in Jensen, although both candidates agreed political views aren’t important to the job they seek.
“I didn’t want to align myself with either party because I don’t think that death really has a political stance whatsoever,” Jensen said in an interview.
“I am a Republican,” Davis said in a separate interview. “I think it’s fair for people to know where I stand, to a certain point. But out of all the political offices in the county, the coroner’s office is the least political one.”
Both candidates already appeared on the August primary ballot. The results didn’t count but they showed that voters strongly preferred Davis. He received 63.6% of the vote to Jensen’s 36%. (The remaining 0.4% were write-ins.)
Candidates spar
Jensen asserts that the coroner should have a medical background and that putting a retired sheriff’s officer in that role creates a conflict of interest.
To illustrate the potential conflict, Jensen points to recent deaths in the county jail.
“When you have the sheriff running the jail and you have [in-custody] deaths like this, if the coroner, who is a retired sheriff’s deputy from the same office, is investigating these deaths, tell me if that’s a conflict of interest,” Jensen said.
In response, Davis said he would be impartial and “do the right job” if elected.
He went on to explain that the coroner only determines the facts related to in-custody deaths, then they are investigated by an outside agency such as the Washington State Patrol. The autopsy would be conducted by a third party as well.
Currently, the Coroner’s Office doesn’t perform autopsies in any case. It has a contract with Snohomish County for that service.
“Anything involved with law enforcement, or anything that’s potentially going to be criminal, you’re going to be doing autopsies,” Davis said. “You’re going to be working with other experts in the field to help the coroner determine the manner and the cause of death.”
At a Sept. 30 candidate forum in Omak, Jensen criticized the Coroner’s Office for lacking national accreditation. The state required all county coroners to be accredited by July 2025.
The state penalizes unaccredited coroner’s offices by withholding 25% of their reimbursement on the cost of autopsies, although Davis said at the forum that the state has not withheld any reimbursements from Okanogan County.
Davis said only 11 coroners in the state have national accreditation, and Okanogan County wasn’t able to apply for accreditation until the Coroner’s Office opened its new facility in March.
“Our old facility didn’t even have running water,” Davis said. “Now we have a facility (with) running water, we have everything that is required to pass accreditation. We are working on it.”
