Episode #72: The Coroner's Call -- Counting the Toll

Jackson has held the highest homicide rate per capita in the nation for five years running. Behind every one of those numbers is a name, a family, and a death someone has to answer for. In Hinds County, that responsibility runs through Jeramiah Howard.

As County Coroner, Howard oversees an office that investigates them all: every scene, every call in the middle of the night, every hardest conversation of someone's life. This week, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with the man who carries the weight of a city's losses to ask the questions most people never think to: What is that life actually like?

What do you learn about a place from the way its people die? And how do you keep doing this work, year after year, in the deadliest city in America?

It's a raw conversation about death, duty, and the human cost behind the statistics from the man who knows them better than anyone.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.