Here's why an Arizona medical examiner is working to track heat-related deaths

Greg Hess deals with death day in, day out.

Hess is the medical examiner for Pima County, Ariz., a region along the United States-Mexico border. His office handles some 3,000 deaths each year — quiet deaths, overdoses, gruesome deaths, tragic ones.

From April through October every year, Hess is confronted with an increasingly obvious and dramatic problem: His morgue drawers fill with people who died sooner than they should have because of Arizona’s suffocating heat.