Support Team Staff
From left to right: Stephanee Walker - Todd Holman - Aleah Scharfenberg - Hunter Phillips - MaLisa Toddy
In 2023, The Coroner's Office created the Survivor Support program to provide on-scene advocacy and follow-up services to survivors of a local death. We are the only organization providing these services in Crawford County.
Each time someone dies or experiences a major trauma in our community, six people, on average request Survivor Support Services. These people, whom we call "Survivors," are mostly encountered by law enforcement on scene and occasionally by ambulance and fire departments who pass along their request for support to Crawford County Dispatch.
Our Purpose as the Survivor Support Team
The foundation of our work is the belief in each survivor's capacity to recover from trauma and grief through resilience. We provide immediate logistical support and ongoing guidance to connect survivors to grief and dying resources.
Survivors can be all kinds of people - roommates, friends, family members or a concerned neighbor or passer-by. Survivors may be family, close to the decedent, or happen upon a deceased person by chance. They may be involved in attempting to save a life or may find someone who obviously died sometime prior. Anyone could happen to be first on scene at a death and make the discovery of a decedent. The support staff team concentrates on the needs of survivors on the scene and supports next of kin (no matter where they are).
There are two main purposes of the Survivor Support role:
1) Supporting a healthy resilience to trauma and the mental well-being of survivors and
2) Allowing the death investigator (Coroner) to focus on handling the body and subsequent investigation.
Typical survivors of Crawford County deaths include family members plus both bystander and uniformed first responders, accident eyewitnesses, and staff members of those businesses where death occurs.
