Marinette County to handle Menominee County medical examiner duties

Marinette County has taken on Menominee County medical examiner duties, changing who answers when a death must be investigated in a rural part of the Upper Peninsula-border region. For families dealing with unattended deaths, traffic fatalities or suspicious circumstances, the practical shift is that the county contact point now runs through Marinette County’s established office.

Marinette County already operates a Medical Examiner’s Office that says it provides impartial, expert investigations into the causes and manners of death. The office advertises service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week through on-call investigators, which matters in a county system where death investigations can begin at any hour and often involve law enforcement, hospitals and funeral homes at the same time.

The office is listed at 2161 University Dr. in Marinette, Wis., and county records identify Kalyn Van Ermen as Marinette County’s medical examiner. For Menominee County families, the immediate change is less about paperwork and more about where the call goes first, who dispatches an investigator and which county office handles the next step in the legal process after a death. In a sparsely populated area, that coordination can shape how quickly a scene is reviewed and how smoothly release and reporting steps move forward.

Menominee County still maintains a Medical Examiner department listing on its official website, underscoring that death investigation remains a formal county responsibility in Wisconsin even when one county relies on another for coverage. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services also keeps a statewide coroner and medical examiner list, reflecting the fact that every county must have a system for these cases, whether by coroner or appointed medical examiner.

The broader pattern across Wisconsin has been a move toward appointed medical examiners and shared-service arrangements in smaller counties that do not always have the staffing to cover specialized work on their own. For Menominee County, the key issue now is continuity: whether residents, responders and funeral directors see the same required steps, with a different county office taking the lead when a death must be examined.