Updated June 12, 2001, 6:15 p.m. ET
L.A. Coroner's gift shop Web site offers levity for heavy matters  
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A toe tag is just one of the products you can purchase online at lacoroner.com.

This is the first installment of a new Courttv.com weekly series called "Caught on the Web," in which we will feature interesting or unusual Web sites related to courts and crime news. Look for it every Wednesday.

Leave it to La La Land to lend levity to a grave subject matter. But it's all for a good cause.

Pay a visit to Skeletons in the Closet, the L.A. County Coroner's Office gift shop's "unofficial" Web site, and explore the lighter side of the morgue.

The site opens up with the photo of a dead person's toe with an identification tag hanging from it and beckons, "Part of you think it's in poor taste." One click away, it proclaims, "Part of you wants an XL," above the chalk outline of a t-shirt.

Want a way short of intervention to keep your favorite drunk relative on the wagon and off the road for good? Consider the toe tag key chain inscribed with, "This could be you ... Please don't drink and drive."

Little wonder that all proceeds from the shop go to the Department of Coroner's Youthful Drunk Driver Visitation Program, an alternative sentencing option available in Los Angeles.

The tan-averse beach bum is likely to get a kick out of a beach towel replete with body outline. And the undertaker's boxer shorts give new meaning to the great American underwear debate — boxers or briefs. Cooks too shy to go naked behind the stove can shield themselves with the L.A. Coroner's Office apron. And car enthusiasts can shield their precious dashboards with the coroner's official car shade.

As a way to allow employees to show their solidarity outside the workplace, the office began making T-shirts bearing the coroner's logo to commemorate office events. Soon, relatives of employees wanted to get in on the action and so on and so on.

In 1993, the office opened a tiny gift shop in a hallway closet on the second floor of the coroner's building. In the first three years, the office netted $700,000 in sales, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

Not bad for a gift shop that came about by "more by fluke than anything else," its Web site proudly states.

Since its humble beginnings, the store has expanded its selection from coroner's logo-adorned T-shirts to note pads, coffee cups, beer-can huggers, soap, organizers and tote bags, among other merchandise. The shop's seven-plus page catalog has featured up to 70 different products at one time or another.

The office hasn't yet broken into the realm of sporting goods but hasn't ruled out putting its emblem on golf balls. Forget about yellow police tape, blue coroner jumpsuits, skeletons. They're completely out of the question.

In 1996, Japan's Hazam International won the rights to sell L.A. coroner merchandise overseas. And just recently, a rival has opened up upstate in Sacramento County with a similar — albeit more modest — venture that offers only T-shirts, baseball caps and lanyards.

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