KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Inside the Knox County Regional Forensic Center, staff members are hard at work in crowded offices, a former closet and a hallway.
"We've just run out of space here. I've tried to cram desks in every place that I could," said Chris Thomas, the chief administrative officer and director. "We've had to add on staff just to keep up with the volume."
The KCRFC first opened in December 2014, after they outgrew the existing space at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. They're facing a similar situation now.
"We did not expect to see this type of growth that quick," Thomas said. "I need more staff. I need more doctors. I need more everything, but I have nowhere to put them."
Thomas said the KCRFC processed roughly 1,900 cases in 2019. That jumped to 2,300 in 2020 and then 2,800 in 2021.
"There were several different times where we actually ran out of cooler space in our morgue," he said. "We were dangerously close to having to stack bodies in places that we didn't want to."
He said there's nowhere left to grow in their current building. The state set aside $20 million to help them build a new facility and the county budgeted for an additional $10 million.
"It's going to be almost double the size of what we have here," Thomas said. "It's so we can have long-term future growth."
The plans for where it'll be located and what it'll look like are still being finalized, but he hopes the new center will open in the next two to three years.
In addition to conducting all the autopsies for Knox and Anderson counties, they assist with more difficult cases in 21 other East Tennessee counties.
"We know if we don't do something now, three or four years from now, we're going to be right back in the same situation with the Knox County population growth and just the continued rise in drug-related deaths everywhere," Thomas said. "We decided it was necessary to get a new facility."