ST. TAMMANY PARISH, La. — The coroner in St. Tammany Parish is in charge of sexual assault investigations in a five-parish area on the Northshore.
But in four days, incoming coroner Dr. Christopher Tape plans to end the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program there and kick the responsibility for all forensic medical examinations to area hospitals.
“There's no reason for this program to be cut,” said Morgan Lamandre, CEO of Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response, south Louisiana’s leading support organization for sexual assault victims. “It's not a funding issue. It's purely because this man does not want to have this Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program.”
Tape’s sudden announcement cuts the jobs of two full-time SANE program nurses and additional part-time nurses. It comes a month after WWL Louisiana’s exclusive investigation exposed 22-year-old child sexual assault charges against Tape – charges that were thrown out by courts in New Mexico because the Albuquerque district attorney took 14 months to bring an indictment.
In court records, Tape admitted to having his girlfriend’s 7-year-old daughter drop her pants and underwear spanking her, and rubbing her bare bottom.
In an interview with WWL, Tape said it was not molestation and he was administering legitimate discipline “in loco parentis,” in place of the girl’s mother while she wasn’t there.
“I was a kid. I was seven years old. I was like, what the hell is happening?” the victim, now 30, told WWL last month.
Court records show police also found a trove of pornographic magazines and videos, including one of Tape himself spanking a woman. He defended that too.
“Well, it's legal, adult pornography that was in my locked shed that was brought out without any warrant,” he told WWL.
He also told the station that he could run the SANE program as coroner “because I know what a false accusation is like.” Asked how that helped victims get fair treatment, he said, “It doesn't matter whether you're a victim or a defendant. I'm a friend of the court, and that's how I would approach being Region 9 SANE director.”
Region 9 is the five-parish area under the Louisiana Department of Health covering St. Tammany, Washington, Livingston, Tangipahoa, and St. Helena parishes.
But Lamandre wonders if Tape ever planned to keep the SANE program going.
She said she spoke to him shortly before the WWL story aired and she said he claimed the SANE program was essentially illegal.
“He was questioning our current structure for SANEs and saying that the law does not allow for them to perform forensic medical exams on sexual assault survivors, which we know to be 100% false and not accurate,” she said.
In an email today, Tape wrote that Yancy Guerin, whom he tapped to serve as his chief deputy, “had been studying the SANE program as it relates to coroners for many years and had been asking multiple people about its legality as practiced. He first brought his concerns to my attention in 2023.”
Lamandre said Act 229 of 2015, a law the Legislature passed unanimously, clearly established the legality of the SANE program and requires the coroner or his designee to examine all sexual assault victims.
The law does allow coroners to designate hospitals as forensic medical exam centers for victims, but Lamandre also questioned if local hospitals will have enough time to set up those services in just four days to replace the coroner’s SANE program. She also noted that children will have to travel more than an hour to Children’s Hospital in New Orleans to get proper exams if they’ve been sexually assaulted.
Outgoing coroner Dr. Chuck Preston said that’s potentially damaging for already traumatized child victims.
Tape ran unopposed to replace the retiring Preston.
After the WWL story aired, local, parish, and state government legislators called for Tape to resign. He’s ignored them all.
Tape didn’t appear on the ballot and won while receiving no votes, but if he takes office on Monday, about 37,000 St. Tammany voters would have to sign a recall petition to trigger an election that could force him out.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.