Jeffrey Barnard’s office is nearly cleaned out: Gone is the grand, 500-pound bodark desk embossed with the Texas A&M seal. The trash is filled with empty Bubly sparkling water cans and there’s a box of snacks — including a bottle of apple cider vinegar he uses as salad dressing — tucked in the corner. Notebooks and papers are strewn across plastic tables, and he hurriedly tries to neaten them.

“I think I got most of the junk out,” he quips.

He left out a 1981 leather-bound ledger of cases — light reading since he’s been benched from the autopsy rotation in anticipation of his departure. He wants to walk out of the medical examiner’s office with no open cases. A desk clock, a gift from his wife, counts down three days, five hours, 24 minutes and 16 seconds to his retirement. It’s been running for six months.

A trained physician and forensic pathologist, crusader of public safety and administrator by necessity but not passion, Barnard is retiring Friday after 37 prolific years with the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, which houses the medical examiner and crime lab.

The roughly 140-person staff investigates sudden and unexpected deaths in Dallas County. An autopsy — where a physician cuts into a corpse — can take hours, while a report detailing the cause and manner of death can take months and requires as many as 10 people. The information the doctors, technicians, investigators, toxicology analysts and transcriptionists gather informs the justice system, law enforcement and public health. In 2022, Dallas County performed autopsies on 81% of its nearly 5,900 deaths, according to Barnard.

Barnard has spent the majority of his tenure as director of the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences and chief medical examiner — responsible for budgeting, personnel, occasional politicking and more than 300 autopsies a year.

At 69, he’s focusing on other roles: husband, father, friend, doting grandfather, frustrated fisherman, attic-cleaner, fledgling writer and adventurer.

“Thirty-seven years, that’s a long time to do this,” Barnard said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “It’s time for somebody to have new ideas.”

After shepherding Dallas’ dead — victims of serial killers, mass shootings, plane crashes, Hurricane Rita, the Big Flood and a pandemic — he realizes he has put off too much living.

‘Everybody counts, or nobody counts’

After medical school at A&M, Barnard did a year of general surgery residency in Temple. During a rotation in Harris County, working out of the basement of Ben Taub General Hospital, he was allowed to do things no doctor-in-training got to do — like exhume a pioneer grave out of a backyard. That case, he says, became the synopsis of a Patty Duke movie.

He followed a mentor to Suffolk County, New York, for a forensic pathology fellowship before coming back to Texas in 1987. Barnard didn’t expect to be here long, but 3½ years later, he became the boss. He says his rapid, unplanned ascent to chief was a combination of serendipity and good and bad luck.

Then 35, he inherited a department in distress. Dallas had three or four medical examiners, Barnard recalled, and a ballooning homicide rate, which meant the office could autopsy only half of the cases that came through the door. In 1991, Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences had 99 employees and a $5.1 million budget. The 2025 budget is about $25.7 million.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who was on the court in 1991 and has been a confidant for Barnard, described the chief’s management as frugal and “no-nonsense.”

“He took a full complement of work just like anyone else,” Price told The News. “There’s no better respect for leadership than when the troops see you, as the kids say, grinding just like they do. You could call him — it didn’t matter — day or night, weekends.”

Barnard rehabilitated and grew the staff; made strategic hires who took the physical evidence section from a budding DNA laboratory and made it a high-functioning office; modernized toxicology analysis; helped the office become a regional center to do autopsies for smaller counties; and helped design the state-of-the-art Stemmons Corridor office, twice the size of the former building where there was enough space for only six autopsies at a time.

The administrative tasks are something he has to do. Forensic work is what Barnard loves to do. Each case is a puzzle, a mystery to solve, a test of his merits. He’s not sure when his job became a calling.

He performed the autopsies on Nancy Lyons, who was poisoned with arsenic; Aubrey Hawkins, the Irving police officer slain by the Texas 7 prison escapees; “American Sniper” Chris Kyle; Billy Chemirmir’s victims; and the autopsy of the 7/7 police ambush shooter (the only time he used the word “robot” in a death certificate). Among Barnard’s last few cases: homeless, alcoholic, natural causes.

Barnard’s driving purpose is summed up by fictional LAPD detective Harry Bosch, from Michael Connelly’s books: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts.”

‘You just got to keep going’

Barnard left the office early Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, and headed to the gym. He took off his Apple watch, unaware of the stream of notifications flooding his phone. After his workout, he checked the smartwatch and thought, Why all these calls?

It was his deputy chief. Gunfire had erupted in a second-floor office. An employee was injured, and medical examiner Beth Frost and her estranged husband were dead. James Frost is believed to have shot his wife and the other employee before turning the gun on himself.

Barnard’s silence worried his deputy chief. “I thought you might have been killed,” he recalls her saying. Barnard went back to the office. Over the next few days, he consoled staff that witnessed the shooting, dealt with other cases and met with Beth Frost’s family, he said. The Collin County medical examiner’s office handled the autopsies.

Barnard was fond of Frost and devastated by the killings. He thought about retiring then. The murder drove home he couldn’t put off traveling with his wife, picking up the grandkids from school, mundane chores and embracing the unknowns. But he couldn’t bail on his staff. You have to keep going, you have to keep carrying the office, he thought to himself.

“For him to leave the ship at that time would have been like a ship without a rudder,” Commissioner Price said. “He needed to be there to be that glue that kept things together.”

About a year later, Barnard gave county commissioners notice of his intent to retire. The timing “wasn’t coincidental,” he said. His departure will come just before the two-year anniversary of the shooting.

“That’s asking a lot for somebody to keep going,” he said. “You’re having to hold it together, and you feel awful yourself, and everybody else is suffering and you’re suffering. You just got to keep going.”

A portrait of Frost hangs in the office lobby, above a bench. There’s a metal detector at the front door.

Barnard compartmentalized his feelings for decades. He kept his head down, did his job and focused on the medicine. Frost’s death put into perspective the temporal nature of life and that there are loved ones — someone grieving like him — on the other side of every autopsy.

Legacy of hard work, inspiration

The long tenure has not been without controversy: In 1992, he was sued for not holding an inquest into the death of former President John F. Kennedy. (Barnard was in the second grade and not the chief medical examiner at the time of Kennedy’s 1963 assassination) Most recently, an NBC News investigation found thousands of unclaimed bodies since 2019 have been given to the University of North Texas Health Science Center per agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. The medical school has since stopped the program.

“It was a bad set of circumstances,” Barnard said, “but the real ultimate is what do you do to improve? And I think all we can do is try and expand more to finding next of kin. … It wasn’t that we did anything untoward, we were following by statute. Change the statute, change your policy — that’s the way you deal with it.”

Jessica Dwyer is Barnard’s successor, the county announced Monday. Dwyer — a fifth-generation Texan and fellow Aggie — will be the first woman chief. She joined the medical examiner’s office in 2017 and was promoted to deputy chief in 2023. In a statement, Dwyer called it a “privilege to work alongside” Barnard and said she is honored to carry forward “the legacy of excellence he established here.”

“She’s very talented and motivated, and I think she has a good vision,” Barnard said of Dwyer. “There will be things that’ll be different than I did — because there should be. Everybody looks at things differently, and she’s got some ideas that sound to me like really great plans to move forward.

“The fact that she went to A&M was an even bigger bonus.”

When asked what he hopes for the next chief, Barnard said, “Good fortune.”

Barnard hopes his legacy is one of hard work, putting the public and taxpayers first, and inspiring the 70 forensic pathologists he trained. Although Friday is his last official workday, he must return to the Dallas County courthouse Monday to testify in a 1989 cold case murder trial.