CINCINNATI -- Seven weeks after a 20-year-old employee was found dead in Molly Malone's cooler, we're still awaiting his official cause of death.
Police ruled out foul play almost immediately and didn't bring in the homicide unit, according to spokeswoman Tiffaney Hardy.
A co-worker found Brandon Chandler's body inside the Pleasant Ridge pub's cooler on July 31. Sgt. Michael Bell told WCPO that Chandler had not been locked or trapped inside the cooler, that there were no signs of a struggle and that nothing was missing from the restaurant.
RELATED: Police ID 20-year-old man found dead in cooler at Molly Malone's Irish Pub & Restaurant
MORE: Coroner's office has 500+ piece backlog to test for DNA evidence
Autopsies and toxicology reports are currently averaging 14 to 16 weeks at the Hamilton County Coroner's Office, a crime lab employee said, meaning it could be some time until Chandler's official cause of death is released.
Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Sammarco has been lobbying for a new crime lab facility for years. The current building on Eden Avenue is more than 45 years old and space is so limited that technicians often have to process one piece of evidence at a time, she previously told WCPO.
Sammarco's office stopped processing rape kits for Cincinnati Police in July in an attempt to alleviate the processing bottleneck. Police now must drive kits to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations lab in London, near Columbus, for processing.
WCPO will update this story as soon as the coroner concludes its analysis on Chandler.
