Emma Hall, Boulder County coroner, resigns following investigation that revealed negative office atmosphere, high turnover and leadership issues

Emma Hall, Boulder County’s coroner, has announced her resignation after an internal investigation this summer revealed a pervasive negative work environment in the office she ran. Boulder Reporting Lab first surfaced and reported on the investigation that showed the office handling county death investigations was rife with antagonism, favoritism and leadership problems. 

Hall’s last day will be Jan. 11, 2024. First elected in 2010, she took over office management in 2011. Hall could have sought reelection in 2026, for a fifth and final term. 

According to a statement released by the county, once the office becomes vacant in January, the Board of County Commissioners can appoint a new coroner. The interim coroner would then serve until the end of Hall’s term in January 2027.

In an email addressed to Boulder County community members on Dec. 14, Hall, 46, said she was resigning to spend more time with her family. She extended her “sincere gratitude to the Boulder County community for their unwavering support over the past 13 years.” 

This summer, the Boulder County Human Resources Department hired an independent firm to conduct an investigation into multiple complaints against Hall. According to Julia Larsen, the director of Boulder County’s human resources department, the county investigated the complaints because some of them included “a discriminatory basis” for the first time. The county formally investigates reports by employees of sexual harassment, discrimination or retaliation.

The firm investigated 11 claims against Hall and confirmed five of them: favoritism, antagonism, micromanagement, using county purchase cards belonging to other employees for office purchases and adopting multiple “personas.” 

Witness testimonies included in the investigative report alleged Hall made employees accompany her on personal errands, went through employee desks unannounced, and caused her employees to feel as though they were powerless because “as an elected official, she is untouchable and she can do whatever she wants.”

The investigator wrote that “a majority of the BCCO staff report that they have considered leaving the BCCO because of Ms. Hall’s management, which would continue an already significant trend of turnover.” At least eight employees have left the coroner’s office since 2020.

The trend may not be new. According to a document obtained by Boulder Reporting Lab through an open records request, 37 full-time employees worked in the coroner’s office under Hall between 2011 and the present. Of these, 23 were either fired or quit. 

The county would not provide data prior to 2011, and Larsen said given the small size of the coroner’s office it’s hard to compare to other departments. Data she provided between 2020 and 2022 showed an average annual turnover for the county of about 12% compared to 16% at the coroner’s office. In 2021, there was 38.5% turnover in the coroner’s office.

The coroner works mostly out of the public eye overseeing death identifications and autopsies, the initiation of death certificates and other services — including communicating with families in the most trying moments of their lives. In addition to employee complaints, in 2014, Hall made headlines for allegedly denying or restricting eye tissue donations to an Aurora-based eye bank at a rate eight times higher than her predecessor. And in 2018, a former employee sued Hall and the coroner’s office for almost $2.7 million for allegedly pushing her out of a job due to disagreement over a case’s cause of death.

In the wake of this summer’s investigative report, Hall told her staff she would no longer be working from the office as she reassessed her management and leadership approach. She said she would transition back to the office in 2024. She disputed all allegations in the investigative report or offered lengthy explanations for her behavior. 

In her resignation email she said that while she had “achieved significant milestones” for the coroner’s office, “staff morale has been an enduring challenge” that she “inherited and personally confronted during my time in office.”  

Hall declined to comment on her resignation other than with her email to the community.

‘This has been going on for years’

After Boulder Reporting Lab published its report on the investigation in October, several former employees reached out claiming that the complaints from coroner employees against Hall were not a new phenomenon.   

“This has been going on for years,” said Amber Grantham, who started working for the coroner’s office in 2008.

For the first several years of her tenure, she described the office as a great place to work. “I loved the field I was in. I loved being in that office,” she told Boulder Reporting Lab. 

But within months of Hall taking over management of the office in 2011, Grantham went to human resources with frustrations about how Hall treated her and ran the office. “Then she [Hall] came to me and said I wasn’t allowed to talk to HR ever again,” Grantham said. “I had to go straight to her.”

Hall said she did not remember telling any employee this.

Grantham alleged that Hall would prolong death investigations, micromanage investigators’ reports and delay the issuance of death certificates, something Grantham said had a negative impact on Boulder County families.

“Your whole life is on hold if you can’t get a death certificate,” she said.

She reported to county human resources officials that Hall retaliated against her after initial conversations with HR, according to an email provided to Boulder Reporting Lab.

In that email Grantham announced her resignation. 

“I made it a year under Emma,” she said, adding that after Hall took office, work became a stressor that invaded her personal life. 

“HR did nothing,” said a former employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation in her current job. “We all went and talked to them and they did nothing. They weren’t rude or anything, they were just like, ‘Well, she’s an elected official, there’s nothing we can do.’”

In an email to Boulder Reporting Lab before she resigned, Hall said work in the coroner’s office is incredibly taxing, often leading to burnout. She suggested employee quality was to blame for turnover.

“Our work is incredibly hard, the schedule is hard on people and their families,” she told Boulder Reporting Lab. “With the CSI effect this field does attract a lot of people,” she said, referring to the television show that sensationalized crime scene investigation work. 

“We don’t always get well-qualified and experienced applicants since this is a small field,” she said, adding that often employees quickly realize the field isn’t for them. 

“And in small offices there isn’t a lot of room for promotion,” she said. “This can lead to staff reaching burn out or moving on in their careers.”

She added that the office she inherited from the previous coroner was in an abysmal state.

“When I first took office in 2011, I was absolutely devastated with how I found the office being ran,” she said, describing boxes of case files whose reports had never been written, trash bags overflowing with “commingled and unmarked evidence,” and lockers “stuffed full of property never returned to the families of the deceased.”

“I spent my first three months in office, photographing, documenting and evaluating the state of the office and went to the commissioners with several requests for resources and budget to bring the office up to modern-day standards,” she said. 

A term-limit extension amid complaints

In 2019, eight years into her tenure, the Board of County Commissioners agreed to put a measure on the ballot, at Hall’s request, to extend the consecutive coroner term limits from three terms to five. The measure passed, meaning Hall would have been allowed to be in office for 20 years. 

Elise Jones, a commissioner at the time, said from what she remembered, “the county commissioners didn’t have knowledge of any complaints of the nature and severity of what we’re seeing reported in the media today at the coroner’s office.”

Deb Gardner, also a commissioner at the time, said “it is customary that when another county elected official comes to the commissioners and asks that a term extension be put on the ballot, they do so.”

“It is the voters’ decision to extend or not,” she said.

In the lead up to her second election, and the only one where Hall ran opposed, the Daily Camera published an article in which the spokesperson for an Aurora-based eye bank expressed frustration with Hall. The article stated that Hall’s alleged increased investigation time meant fewer tissue donations were viable for transplant. 

The spokesperson said that between 2012 and 2013, there were 28 Boulder County cases where eye tissue donations were denied by the coroner or delayed enough to make transplants infeasible. The spokesperson gave the context that in 2009 and 2010, before Hall took office, there were a total of two such denials. In the article, Hall said her office’s diligence in autopsies accounted for the denials. 

“To me, it’s just really important, as the coroner, that we advocate for our needs, and that we are able to follow our protocols and do the best that we can for our roles and responsibilities to determine manner and cause of death,” Hall said in the article.

‘It was incredibly, incredibly stressful’

Twelve full-time employees were interviewed in the independent investigation of the coroner’s office this past summer out of the 15 office employees. Most of those employees shared a common fear about losing their jobs “due to Ms. Hall’s history of removing or ‘pushing out’ employees she does not like,” the report said. The names of witnesses were redacted.

Angel Luehring, an investigator in the coroner’s office between January 2012 and October 2014, said she felt this anxiety prior to this summer’s report. “It was incredibly, incredibly stressful,” Luehring said of her time in the coroner’s office.

Luehring told Boulder Reporting Lab that in her time, Hall would periodically “grill” investigators, asking them to come into her office to, among other things, try to get them to give her information about their co-workers. “It kind of created an environment of not knowing if you could trust your fellow investigators because you didn’t know what they might be saying about you to her.”

“I didn’t feel confident,” Luehring said. “I felt if I tried to make a decision on my own, I would be punished for that.”

Hall told Boulder Reporting Lab she did not remember the alleged grillings Luehring described.

Maury Miller worked as an investigator in the coroner’s office from July 2011 until December 2012. Miller validated Hall’s statement to Boulder Reporting Lab that the office was in disarray when she arrived. 

“She came into a real storm,” Miller said, describing reports and junk piled all over the place, and broken histology samples leaking through the morgue. He said when he arrived “she was still in the process of trying to organize that.”

And while Miller said he appreciated some of the structure Hall tried to add to the office, “she ordered and directed instead of led,” he said. “Given her uncertainty as a leader, she overcompensated and came down hard on things.”

In her resignation announcement to the community, Hall said she will be working with the coroner’s office staff to ensure a smooth transition and no interruptions in service over the next few weeks.

“I am hopeful that the incoming coroner will continue working towards improving staff morale and fostering a positive and professional work environment,” she said.