Snider handled 460-plus files last year, spanning much of the Lower Mainland to the U.S. border, Bowen Island and the Sunshine Coast. It's the last chance that person has of saying what happened to them. Coroners are not doctors, not necessarily anyway. The job, rather, calls for the investigative skills of a detective or a reporter, with a touch of an engineer's cool logic. Snider himself is a former military jet pilot, construction foreman and ambulance crew chief in Whistler.
Discretion is one necessity of the job.
Powers of observation and asking the right questions are other skills that can come in handy at the scene. In one case, he says, a man discovered in a Vancouver hotel room with a plastic bag on his head looked at first like a suicide but was, in fact, a murder. Another man, found with a 400-pound rock on his chest in Pender Harbour, turned out to have killed himself. Cause of death is not always what it appears to be, Snider says. And it's a coroner's job to figure it out.