| Alum Working as Chief Deputy Coroner of Dauphin Co. |
08.17.12 |
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Her outgoing personality may not seem like the type you would find working in a coroner’s office, but it may in fact be what makes Lisa Potteiger ’09 the perfect person for the job.
Potteiger is chief deputy coroner and forensic investigator for the Dauphin County – a post she has held since 2004. Potteiger earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Lebanon Valley College after taking classes at Harrisburg Area Community College and working several years as a paramedic.
“I have been a student for most of my adult life,” Potteiger said. “It’s really hard to go to school while working in public safety because you have shift work and long hours. Typically, you work 12 and 16-hour shifts, depending on what company you work for. I would take classes, get tired out, and stop.”
Potteiger was hired by the Office of the Coroner in 2001 as a part-time investigator while still working as a paramedic. When the office offered her a full-time position and a regular shift, she was able to transfer previous credits to LVC and attend part time. “My years at LVC were wonderful,” she said. “It was a hard education. I was working full time here and part time as a paramedic, so time management became really critical for me.”
In 2008, county coroner Graham Hetrick promoted Potteiger to chief deputy based on her superior abilities to gather and analyze the data involved in her case work. For Potteiger, the joy of the job is in the daily problem solving and in the science behind it.
In her current role, she functions at a management level reviewing charts, issuing death certificates, and cleaning up and completing other investigator’s cases. “Sometimes, people go out and get an investigation started and might not be here for a few days, so I’ll do a lot of the follow-up work,” she said. “I also back up other deputies if they get behind on calls and occasionally put myself on the street for shifts if there are holes in the schedule.”
So what type of person goes into this line of work? “I would say people that go into a field like this are completely different from your average medical student,” Potteiger said. “We’re not medicine or law; we straddle the fence. “
“What surprises people is that there’s actually a lot of joy to this job. If someone’s been suffering for a while and they die, the family feels grief but they also feel relief. Sometimes, death is not unwelcome and you can guide that family through that moment of death.”
Though candidates are not required to hold a college degree, Potteiger can foresee that changing in the near future and recommends heavy study in the sciences. All members of Dauphin County’s staff have experience in emergency services with EMS, firefighting, or police work. Seeing trauma firsthand, Potteiger says, makes it easier to understand death as an investigator.
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