Lost body recovered by State Police

A body that disappeared from the state medical examiner's office 10 days ago was found buried in a Boston cemetery yesterday, closing one chapter in a macabre story that led to the suspension of Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Mark A. Flomenbaum .

State Police found the body of Thomas E. Brissette interred in a cemetery under the name of another deceased individual, whose corpse was located yesterday in storage at the medical examiner's headquarters in Boston's South End, the state Executive Office of Public Safety said last night.

The statement did not identity the other body or specify where the corpse of Brissette, who died at age 49, was unearthed.

Brissette's brother, Paul Brissette , 54, of Vineyard Haven, said he received a call from State Police late in the afternoon telling him the body had been found in a cemetery in Boston, where it was buried April 25.

State Police yesterday obtained permits to unearth two bodies from Boston graves to determine whether one of them was Brissette, said Ann Scales , spokeswoman for the Boston Public Health Commission, which must approve such requests.

Paul Brissette said his family was relieved to hear of the discovery, a day after the medical examiner's office called him to say that the body of his brother, who was found dead April 23 in his federally subsidized unit at a South Yarmouth motel, was missing from the office.

"We were all trying to come to grips with his death, and now we have to deal with this," he told the Globe.

Kurt N. Schwartz , the undersecretary of public safety for law enforcement, praised State Police for finding the body so quickly. The medical examiner's office realized the body was missing on April 25, a day after it was autopsied, Schwartz said, but did not alert state officials until Thursday, more than a week later.

"The public and the family of Mr. Brissette deserve a full accounting of how this happened, how it will be addressed, and how we proceed to ensure this never happens again," Schwartz said.

He said the two bodies had been properly tagged, but that other standard procedures for releasing bodies had not been followed and that neither the medical examiner's office nor the funeral home that took Brissette's body to the cemetery realized it was the wrong one. Identification should have been checked, but the statement did not specify which procedures were not followed.

Employees of the Cavalier Motor Lodge, where Thomas Brissette had recently moved into a Section 8 unit, found him dead in his bed on April 23. The employees were alerted by friends of Brissette, who were concerned because they had not seen him for a few days.

Brissette, one of eight children, suffered from bipolar disorder, diabetes, and high blood pressure and had led a transient life in recent years, including living at a homeless shelter on Hyannis, said his brother. A native of Stoneham, Brissette studied aeronautical mechanics at Wentworth Institute of Technology, worked for General Electric and later as a contractor on the Cape, Paul Brissette said.

But his mental health began to deteriorate about seven years ago. "He couldn't hold a job and went homeless for a while," said Paul Brissette.

He said that he had invited him to live with him and his wife on Martha's Vineyard, but Thomas Brissette declined. "He wanted to live life on his own terms."

Because his death was unattended, he was taken to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy, after which he was supposed to be released to a funeral home for burial.

On Thursday night, Governor Deval Patrick suspended Flomenbaum with pay, ordered his staff to stop looking for Brissette's body, and directed the State Police to find it. The Patrick administration also vowed to dismiss Flomenbaum if the allegations that the body had been misplaced turned out to be true.

Yesterday, the Patrick administration said Flomenbaum remains on suspension but did not say whether he will be fired. Dr. Frederick R. Bieber , a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and associate professor of pathology at Harvard, has agreed to serve temporarily as chief executive officer of the medical examiner's office.

Flomenbaum, who was hired by Governor Mitt Romney in early 2005 to fix what was widely regarded as one of the worst state medical examiner's offices in the country, did not return repeated phone calls yesterday.

If the Patrick administration sacks Flomenbaum, he would be the second head of an agency overseen by the Executive Office of Public Safety to lose his job in recent weeks.

On March 9, Carl Selavka , the longtime civilian director of the State Police crime laboratory abruptly resigned under pressure over the alleged mishandling of DNA test results in about two dozen unsolved sexual assault cases by the administrator of the computerized database, who was subsequently fired.

As with Selavka, who had run the lab since July 1998, several colleagues of Flomenbaum rallied to his defense yesterday. Several officials familiar with the troubled history of the medical examiner's office said that the agency has been underfunded and mismanaged for years and that Flomenbaum appears to have worked hard to fix the problems.

He came to Boston from the New York City medical examiner's office, where he won praise for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But seven weeks ago, reports surfaced of unclaimed bodies stacking up at the South End headquarters and of the office running out of basic supplies such as body bags and toe tags. The office was rushing to meet a deadline to turn over all unclaimed bodies for burial.

"My impression of what's going on is that Flomenbaum is perceived by the current administration as a liability to them, and they're either posturing to say, 'We've gotten the bad apple out,' or they are making irrational decisions," said William Schneiderman , a former director of emergency medical services for the Boston metropolitan region, who does not know Flomenbaum.

"The sad thing is that we stand to lose someone who came to the office passionate about what he does and with impeccable credentials," he said.

Dr. Patricia J. O'Malley , director of pediatric emergency services at MassGeneral Hospital for Children and a member of a state child fatality review team chaired by Flomenbaum, credited him for making sure his office does autopsies on children whose deaths need explanation and not on youngsters who died of obvious causes.

"If the facts are borne out that he was not performing his job competently, then there's reason to fire him," she said. "But I would be astonished if that's what they show. . . . He's trying to do a loaves-and-fishes miracle here."

Peter Stefan , the head of a Worcester funeral home, said the problem has been decades of under funding and neglect by state leaders. "I don't blame him for one thing," he said.

John R. Ellement and Donovan Slack of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.