Were B.C. teen’s remains missed because coroner attended site virtually?

When police attended a single-room occupancy building in East Vancouver three years ago, they found the body of “Jimmy” Van Chung Pham, a man with a criminal history who would later be described as a predator by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.

What police did not notice at the time were the bodies of missing Indigenous teenager Noelle O’Soup and a woman called Elma Enan, whose decomposing remains were only located months later in the tiny room that Vancouver police told the CBC was occupied by an “extreme hoarder.”

The attending officer is now facing a neglect-of-duty investigation by the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, B.C.’s civilian police oversight agency.

But the two bodies had also gone unnoticed by a second investigator — the community coroner, or field coroner, tasked with Pham’s death scene.

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Coroner didn’t attend sudden death scene where Noelle O’Soup’s body was eventually found

The coroner had missed the bodies for a very simple reason: they did not attend in person.

Former community coroner Sonya Schulz said the BC Coroners Service stopped requiring coroners to attend certain death scenes in person as a way to save money several years ago.

She said one of those scenes was Pham’s apartment, and the coroner attended the scene “remotely” by speaking to the investigating police officer by phone. The Canadian Press has independently confirmed that account.

Schulz said the alarming case had been widely discussed among coroners and she and her colleagues believed the bodies would not have gone unnoticed if a coroner had attended in person.

“We all were like, oh, yeah, so that’s what happens when you don’t send a coroner to scene,” she said.

She said she believed the two other bodies could have been found sooner because of signs including an “odour of decomposition” that other residents of the building complained about before Pham’s death.

Schulz drew a direct line between the investigative failures in the foul unit at 405 Heatley Ave. in February 2022 and years of neglect for the service — encompassing low regard for their important duties, financial restrictions on the service, and low pay for field coroners who receive $32 an hour and are not paid at all while…