LEXINGTON, Ky. — It was late last March when Stacey Burnett says her husband and two boys were backing out of the driveway.
Their 18-year-old son Nathan was in Utah snowboarding on spring break.
A Fayette County deputy coroner pulled up to their Lexington home with a small piece of paper, Burnett said.
“He just handed that to us and said, ‘You need to call Utah. I don’t have any details whatsoever,’” Burnett told Spectrum News 1. “And we kept asking him, at least asking if he was dead and he just said, ‘I don’t have any details. I don’t know.’ But we figured, it’s a coroner, that he was dead ... I started screaming in the lawn and my boys were just standing there watching and my husband started trying to call Utah and call the sheriff.”
The family learned on that call that Nathan had been killed in a snowboarding accident, Burnett said.
He was kind and adventurous, with plans to go to college out west and just months away from graduating from Henry Clay High School, she said.
“Getting notified was the worst news we’d ever, ever heard, and he meant the world to us and just it boiling down to just a tiny sheet of paper and no respect for, ‘I’m so sorry this happened,’ or ‘Please sit down so I can tell you what happened,’ I just feel like it was disrespectful to the life he lived and to our emotions about him and our love for him,” said Burnett.
Burnett said she learned of a few similar stories from other Kentucky families and contacted Sen. Ralph Alvarado (R, Winchester).
Last month, she shared her family’s story with a Senate committee to support Senate Bill 66, known as “Nathan’s Law,” sponsored by Alvarado.
“I feel that the way we were informed was cold, impersonal, unprofessional,” Burnett told lawmakers. “It caused a lot of extra trauma for my two younger sons.”
The bill would mandate training on the grieving process and providing death notices, and it would require that when notifying families, the coroner or deputy coroner has emergency medical crews on standby and a second person with them, that the notification is given verbally, in person and respectfully, and that if a family member is alone, they stay with them until someone else can be there.
“I believe it is important that we provide our coroners every educational opportunity to know how to deliver the worst news a family may ever hear in their lifetime,” Alvarado said on the Senate floor.
An amended version of Senate Bill 66 passed the Senate unanimously and moves next to the House.
“We can’t change anything about how he died, but if we can just help other families feel a little bit more comforted, and it be in his name ... it would make us feel a little more at peace,” said Burnett.
Fayette County Coroner Gary Ginn told Spectrum News 1 that a deputy coroner verbally informed the Burnetts that Nathan had died, but Ginn would not provide further details.
He said he prefers families receive information from the person directly handling the case.
“My heart definitely goes out to her, just simply because I mean this guy’s 18 years old, he’s a young guy, he’s having the time of his life, spring break and that’s what he should have been doing,” Ginn said.
Providing death notifications is one of the most difficult parts of the job and every notification is different, Ginn said.
“I think any time myself or my deputies or anybody, really, can get more education and learn more about a particular topic or subject ... we’re all better when we’re able to do that,” he said.