Jeffrey Barnard inherited a department in distress when he took the reins of Dallas County’s medical examiner’s office in 1991. In 34 years, the staff has grown, the number of autopsies performed each year has almost doubled, and a once-fledging crime lab has become a high-functioning department.
Dallas, TX
37 years as Dallas County’s medical examiner taught Jeffrey Barnard about death — and life
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.
Dallas, TX
Off-duty Dallas officer shoots at suspects allegedly trying to steal his vehicle in Addison, police say
An off-duty Dallas police officer shot at a group of people allegedly trying to steal his personal vehicle on Sunday afternoon in Addison, officials said.
According to the Addison Police Department, around 2:15 p.m., the off-duty Dallas officer saw a group of people trying to steal his vehicle in a parking lot at 5000 Belt Line Road. He confronted the suspects, “and during the encounter, fired a weapon at the suspects’ vehicle.”
The suspects fled in their vehicle, Addison police said, and it is unknown if any suspects were hit by gunfire.
The investigation is ongoing.
The Dallas Wings can’t seem to get a win, at least when it comes to the team’s training facility and arena. Not only is its practice facility in west Oak Cliff, approved over the summer and fast-tracked to open ahead of the team’s spring season, now running behind schedule, it is also somehow over budget.
Dallas had already committed $55 million for the team’s practice facility, a price tag we were uncomfortable with from the beginning. At the time, city staff said that was the amount needed to build a training facility with the amenities and infrastructure required for a WNBA team. The city argued there were few viable alternative locations for the practice facility after delays with the convention center, and they were running out of time. Enter the $55 million facility at Joey Georgusis Park.
But now the project needs an additional $27 million to cross the finish line. How did costs increase so much in just a few months? And how did a project that was expedited to meet the team’s deadline end up falling behind and over budget?
City staff attribute the holdup to missed deadlines by the project management firm McKissack and McKissack and new requirements from the WNBA that weren’t part of the original scope. McKissack and McKissack didn’t respond to multiple messages seeking comment for this editorial. Whatever the company’s missteps, the city is ultimately responsible for conducting due diligence and making sure the project stays on track, and it couldn’t deliver what it promised.
Now the city wants the Wings to take over. The city would cap its total contributions at $57 million, which includes $653,000 in delay reimbursements. The Wings would then cover the remaining costs, at least $27 million, needed to finish the practice facility and agree not to sue Dallas for the delays.
Some City Council members have suggested that Dallas should consider the American Airlines Center for the Wings’ practice facility and arena. But even though the Dallas Mavericks and the Dallas Stars, who currently play at the AAC, are looking to leave, their lease agreements run through 2031. That doesn’t do much for the Wings who need a practice facility now.
Maybe all of this could have been avoided if the city had more seriously considered existing facilities that could have accommodated the Wings. That’s not to say the team doesn’t deserve a training space that will meet their needs, but repurposing an existing space instead of starting from the ground up might have saved both time and money.
This debacle is frustrating for the Wings, and it also isn’t a good look for the city. If Dallas can’t figure out how to deliver a practice facility that it promised to one of its professional sports teams, how can it hope to attract more businesses and major investments? Anyone watching this unfold would have good reason to question the city’s ability to deliver.
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If you want some insight into how the Cowboys are thinking heading into free agency Monday, consider the trade they didn’t make this weekend.
The Cowboys were interested in star edge rusher Maxx Crosby before the Las Vegas Raiders sent him to the Baltimore Ravens for two first-round picks. Dallas offered one of its first-round picks in this year’s draft and a second-round pick in 2027, a person familiar with the team’s thinking told The Dallas Morning News.
In doing so, the Cowboys made it known how willing — or unwilling — they were to go to get a premium defender.
It’s no secret the Cowboys have a lot to do this offseason. That’s especially true on defense, where the Cowboys are tasked with rebuilding the league’s worst defense from a year ago. It’s factual, as well, that there are many ways the Cowboys could approach this offseason.
Here are 10 steps the Cowboys can take toward achieving a perfect offseason — at least in our eyes.
1. Don’t be tempted by Trey
The Seattle Seahawks had a dominant defense a year ago. It’s a major reason they won the Super Bowl. Fun fact: that defense also had just one player with a contract with an annual value over $20 million per year. The Cowboys, meanwhile, had three such players on their defense last season.
The point: sometimes it’s more about the collective than adding one high-priced, yet very good, free agent. That’s especially true for the Cowboys.
Trey Hendrickson is going to have a big market. Interested teams have waited for the opportunity to sign him for years. Spotrac projects his market value at $25.4 million, and there’s a chance his final deal goes above that.
The Cowboys aren’t one instant-impact free agent away from improving this defense. They need more than that.
2. Make Alontae Taylor the main target
New Cowboys defensive coordinator Christian Parker wants a versatile defense. He’ll need versatile chess pieces, especially in the secondary. Saints corner Alontae Taylor could be that chess piece. Taylor can play in the slot and outside. He also hasn’t missed a game in the last three seasons, lowering the injury risk for a secondary that has a bunch of it.
Taylor won’t come cheap. Spotrac gives him a market value over $11 million, though he could sign for more. The Cowboys haven’t waded into waters like that for a free agent in some time — but they should in this case.
Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Nakobe Dean (17) celebrates after sacking Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott during the third quarter of an NFL football game at AT&T Stadium on Sunday, Nov. 23, 2025, in Arlington.
Smiley N. Pool / Staff Photographer
3. Get your green dot
The Cowboys are on the hunt for someone to play alongside linebacker DeMarvion Overshown. They want someone who can be their green-dot Mike linebacker to get everyone aligned in Parker’s defense. It makes sense, then, that Eagles linebacker Nakobe Dean will be one of their targets, multiple people familiar with the team’s thinking have indicated.
Dean understands the system, he fits what they’re looking for next to the speedy Overshown, and he can be a valuable blitzer. The one problem: he’s been injury-prone recently. That’s why he shouldn’t be the only linebacker they acquire this offseason — but he should be the first. Former Giants linebacker Bobby Okereke could be another option higher in the market.
4. Targets at safety
It’s become obvious that this year’s safety draft class has the chance to produce a good amount of quality starters. Whether it’s Caleb Downs early, or TCU’s Bud Clark on Day 2, there are good options. That should also push down the price for some veteran safety free agents. The Cowboys should take advantage and double-dip. It’ll be interesting to see the market for former Eagles safety Reed Blankenship. Another affordable option could be Denver’s P.J. Locke. Both have familiarity with Parker.
5. Don’t put more holes in the boat
One of the popular external conversations since the end of the season has been about veteran safety Malik Hooker and right tackle Terence Steele. The Cowboys could save $20 million in cap space by releasing both and designating them as post-June 1 cuts. While tempting, don’t expect the Cowboys to be in the business of adding more holes to a boat they’re trying to fix. They also lack known entities behind them worth entrusting.
6. Use No. 12 on best corner or edge rusher
Remember when I brought up Seattle? Part of the Seahawks’ success has come from drafting well on defense. The Cowboys haven’t drafted well on defense in a while. They need to hit on their 12th pick and they need to do it at a vital position like corner or edge. If one of the elite edge rushers falls and is there, take them. If Mansoor Delane from LSU is there, sprint to the podium. It’ll be hard to find affordable, quality options at both positions in free agency, making it more important to get one at the draft. Stick at No. 12 and pick there.
LSU defensive back Mansoor Delane answers questions during a press conference at the NFL football scouting combine in Indianapolis, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026.
Eric Gay / AP
7. Trade back from No. 20
As for Dallas’ second first-round pick, I’d recommend moving back to get more Day 2 selections. The Cowboys don’t have any after trading for defensive tackle Quinnen Williams and George Pickens last year. It’s easier said than done, of course, but if a team is willing to move up and offer multiple picks to do so, then the Cowboys should be willing. People familiar with the team’s thinking have said they want to get back into Day 2. That portion of the draft, the second and third rounds, is very dense in talent this year. The Cowboys have a ton of holes on defense, but they could remedy those problems with more selections.
8. Let free agents test market
The Cowboys have nearly 20 free agents of their own. Outside of a few exceptions, and outside of exclusive rights free agents like corners Josh Butler and Reddy Steward, it would be wise for the Cowboys to let them hit the market. Dallas needs a clean slate on defense.
9. Extend Quinnen Williams (and do something with Kenny Clark, too)
The Cowboys already restructured the deals for wide receiver CeeDee Lamb, left guard Tyler Smith and quarterback Dak Prescott. More moves to open up cap space should be expected, as well. The two logical areas are the contracts for Williams and Clark. Both have over a $21 million cap hit for next season. That has to change. For Williams, I’d get ahead of things and sign him to a major extension now. He’s one of the best defensive linemen in the NFL and should be a cornerstone for this defense. Pay him like it. Clark could be an extension or pay-cut candidate. His cap hit can’t be that high if the Cowboys want to make the moves they’re motivated to make.
10. Let situations with Aubrey, Pickens play out
Cowboys kicker Brandon Aubrey indicated this week he’s open to seeing what the market looks like for him as a restricted free agent. The Cowboys have had an offer on the table that would make him the highest-paid kicker in the NFL, eclipsing Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who makes $6.4 million per year. No deal has been consummated, however, resulting in the Cowboys placing a second-round tender on Aubrey worth around $5.8 million.
If a team wants Aubrey they’ll have to sign him to a record deal and give up a second-round pick for him — a price that is unlikely to be met.
The Cowboys have every reason to let Aubrey’s situation play out. The same can be said for George Pickens. The Cowboys placed the non-exclusive franchise tag on Pickens, worth just under $28 million a year. Pickens is worth more than that, but how much? The market should give some indication, but just like Aubrey, the price will likely be too high for other teams. The Cowboys would get two first-round picks if someone agreed to a deal with Pickens and the Cowboys elected not to match.
The Cowboys have leverage in both situations. Aubrey and Pickens have some, too: they’re both Pro Bowl players and their services would be missed.
I know, I know: Is it worth having more offseason contract drama? In this case, for the Cowboys, it probably is.
Find more Cowboys coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.
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