Los Angeles County pushes for more transparency in high-profile autopsies

Los Angeles County chief medical examiner Dr. Odey Ukpo is pushing for greater transparency after the autopsy findings in 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s case drew unusual scrutiny. Autopsy reports rarely come with barbed comments, and the wording in this report put the county’s handling of high-profile deaths under sharper public review.

Ukpo, photographed in Los Angeles on June 16, 2026, leads an office that has already handled other high-profile cases, including Matthew Perry’s death. In the Rivas Hernandez matter, the findings were kept under a court-related hold for months before release, and county materials identify the case as 2025-14252. The release then fed a separate investigation into whether employees at the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office viewed confidential files without authorization after grisly details from the case circulated publicly.

The family of Celeste Rivas Hernandez has been devastated by the findings, the family attorney said. That reaction has sharpened the question facing Los Angeles County: how much detail belongs in an autopsy report when a death has already become a public spectacle. The county medical examiner website says the public can learn about the department, cases, services and process, and the office also maintains a case-search system and online services. Even so, a minor’s death can turn every line of a report into an object of online speculation before investigators finish their work.

Los Angeles is not the only place wrestling with that balance, but its approach is more visible because of the attention surrounding this case. Cook County in Illinois says its medical examiner office keeps full and complete records in line with state law for law firms, insurers, legal representatives and authorized government agencies. Hennepin County in Minnesota offers a public medical examiner case search, while Multnomah County in Oregon says privacy of the deceased is its highest priority and limits access to first-degree relatives and representatives. Onondaga County in New York goes further, saying autopsy information is not public record and is treated as a confidential medical record. California has faced this fight before, too, with scrutiny over medical examiner death classifications in inmate-death cases in 2022.