IDAHO FALLS — Improving infant and child death investigations in Idaho is the goal of a recent $10,000 grant awarded to the Bingham County coroner.

The Idaho Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk provided the funding to Jimmy Roberts for a series of three in-person and virtual training sessions across the state for coroners, law enforcement, child advocates and providers of Emergency Medical Services.

Roberts and Brett Harding, Ada County chief deputy coroner, gave the first session April 10 at the Ada County Coroner’s Office in Meridian. They appeared in the Idaho Falls Police Complex for the second session Tuesday. The last session will be held at the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office in Hayden on June 2.

About 50 people attended the session in Idaho Falls.

“Essentially approaching an infant and child’s death is very much a team sport, and we want to have as many people that would touch that child’s death involved in knowing what the standards are, what we’re looking for and how we do it,” Roberts said.

“Our law enforcement partners, our coroners and medical legal death investigators, as well as the medical community, all have to play a part in this,” Harding said. “Even the best forensic pathologists are only as good as the information they’re given.

“That’s why I emphasize with all these law enforcement guys that cause and manner of death rests in your hands many times, and that’s preserving the scene where the event was found.”

The session by Roberts and Harding in Idaho Falls began in the morning and stretched into the late afternoon with discussions, video evidence and guidelines for the scene investigator of infant death from the Department of Health and Human Services.

“We actually kind of have a conversation throughout between ourselves and share as much as we can,” Roberts said. “Brett has been doing this in this field for over three decades.”

“Jimmy has come into this field with passion, especially about infant deaths, and he has rapidly become very knowledgeable in this field,” Harding said.

Roberts serves on the Idaho Child Fatality Review Team, established by the Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk. The team reviews deaths of children from birth through 17 years to identify preventative measures. The multidisciplinary team meets quarterly to review child abuse, unexpected and preventable deaths to improve child safety and reduce fatalities.

“We review every child fatality in the state,” Roberts said. “If we do not have accurate information about what happened in that child’s death, whether it’s a law enforcement report, a doctor’s report, a coroner’s report, we’re not able to identify those risk factors.

“We’re not able to identify products that might need improvements,” Roberts said. “We might not identify systemic issues that we could fix within the system to save those children. So this is incredibly important.

“I’m lucky enough that by having a relationship with the Ada County Coroner’s Office they allow me to come over and work in their autopsy suite with a forensic pathologist a couple times a month that allows me to directly learn from the pathologist at what they’re looking for,” Roberts said, “and it expands on my 34 years of being a paramedic.”

Roberts and Harding covered details ranging from how to conduct interviews and conversations at the scene to all the types of infant death, including natural, accidental, carbon monoxide, strangulation and homicide.

“If we don’t do it right, you may never know the cause or manner of death because the asphyxia deaths that we’re going to talk about are negative autopsies,” Harding said. “They’re based entirely on the investigation and doll reenactments that this child was in a position and couldn’t breathe.”

A negative autopsy is a complete post-mortem examination—including gross, microscopic and toxicological studies—that fails to reveal a definitive cause of death. While not common, these cases often involve young, healthy individuals, where the cause of death remains undetermined. The findings appear normal or non-specific.

Doll reenactments for a child’s death include Sudden Infant Death Syndrome investigations to document safe sleep environments. These reenactments involve using a doll to represent a deceased child to reconstruct scenes.

Harding emphasized the importance of everyone working together.

“You are a very important partner in determining why a child died,” Harding said. “If we do this right, we can prevent other children from dying by identifying unsafe sleep environments where a family that suffered a tragedy knows that we can’t do this. We’re not going to put our second child or our third child in that same situation.

“What we do here in identifying this and educating people can ultimately save lives by just disseminating this information. I think ultimately through this we’re going to be able to save some child. We’ll never know it, but we will.”

Harding also referenced an infamous case where three infants died in one person’s care.

“This is why you always ask has any other child died in your family?” Harding told the audience. “One is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is homicide.”

According to Harding, forensic knowledge is limited.

“Law enforcement and their investigations are so important, Harding said. “There was a show when I was a kid called “Quincy” about a medical examiner. By the end of the show, he had everything figured out, because it was revealed at the autopsy table. And that is flat out not true.”