Body lost after state autopsy

Governor Deval Patrick last night suspended and is considering firing the state's chief medical examiner after Dr. Mark A. Flomenbaum's office acknowledged earlier in the day that it had lost a corpse that pathologists examined last week.

In the latest embarrassment for the troubled office, officials at the medical examiner's Boston headquarters told state officials that they had misplaced the body of a man that had been transported to Boston from Cape Cod on April 23 and autopsied the next day, said Charles McDonald, a spokesman for the state Executive Office of Public Safety.

McDonald declined to identify the man or say when the medical examiner's office discovered that the body was missing.

Kurt N. Schwartz, the under secretary of law enforcement, ordered the employees of the medical examiner's office to immediately stop looking for the body and directed State Police to take over the search, McDonald said. State Police began investigating yesterday and were poring over documents at the office to try to track the body.

"If the facts as they have been summarized to date are borne out by the investigation, the chief medical examiner will be promptly fired," said a statement issued by the Executive Office of Public Safety.

Flomenbaum did not return repeat ed phone calls yesterday.

He was appointed by the Romney administration in 2005 to address problems at the troubled facility, which had misidentified bodies and made other serious mistakes.

Schwartz said he and Patrick are "horrified by this apparent failure to perform the most basic of duties in this important agency."

"It is critical that all citizens of Massachusetts have confidence in the operation of this vital office," Schwartz said in the statement.

In addition, public safety officials said that Vance, a Virginia-based security services firm that is doing a top-to-bottom, $267,000 review of the State Police crime laboratory, has agreed to scrutinize all operations of the medical examiner's office.

Both the lab and the medical examiner's office are supervised by the Executive Office of Public Safety.

According to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation, the missing body is believed to be that of Thomas E. Brissette, a 49-year-old man with a history of health problems who was found dead in his room at the Cavalier Motor Lodge in South Yarmouth on April 23.

A second source who is familiar with the investigation confirmed that Brissette's body is missing.

Relatives of Brissette could not be reached yesterday.

Police Chief Peter L. Carnes of Yarmouth said yesterday that his officers and State Police were called to the motel on Route 28 and found no signs of foul play, but that the medical examiner's office requested that Brissette's body be shipped to Boston for an autopsy because his death was unattended.

A Cape Cod funeral director, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be publicly linked to the issue, confirmed that his company transported Brissette to the medical examiner's office on April 23. He said his company had no further involvement with the case.

Last night, a Watertown funeral director said she contacted the medical examiner's office on behalf of a second funeral home to obtain Brissette's remains for burial. Pamela Anderson of Faggas Funeral Home said she was told that Brissette's remains are not missing.

Instead, she said, staff at the medical examiner's office told her on Wednesday that they needed more time to confirm the identity before they could release Brissette's body to her.

"They haven't told us that the body is missing," she said. "They told us they would be in touch when everything was complete."

Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, co chairman of the Senate's Public Safety Committee, said a high-ranking aide to Public Safety Secretary Kevin M. Burke told him yesterday that the missing body might have been stored with other bodies that were being removed.

"What I am interested in knowing specifically is, given that this body was in the same cooler as the bodies of unclaimed indigents awaiting burial in a pauper's grave . . . whether or not this has anything to do with the reorganization in March to speed up the moving out of the bodies," Barrios said last night.

Seven weeks ago, an increase in the number of autopsies had caused unclaimed bodies to pile up in the agency's overcrowded Boston headquarters in the South End and in a refrigerated truck parked behind the building.

In addition, the office acknowledged, the plumbing system had clogged, resulting in pools of blood on the autopsy room floor, and basic supplies had run out periodically, including body bags and toe tags.

Following those reports, on March 16 Burke ordered Flomenbaum to turn over all unclaimed bodies within two weeks to state welfare officials, who handle burials for the homeless, and to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides burials for veterans whose bodies are unclaimed.

At the time, Flomenbaum and Burke, whom Patrick appointed in January, also engaged in a public spat over who was to blame.

Burke said public safety officials had given Flomenbaum money to expand storage and had eased regulations to help him remove bodies.

Flomenbaum countered that state officials had failed to deliver promised money for additional space and other improvements, even though the office's budget increased by 38 percent since he took over.

By April 27, nearly a month after the two-week deadline, the office had released 88 bodies, including two that had been stored at the office since the mid-1990s, and still had 26 corpses at the headquarters, according to Marcia S. Izzi, its chief administrative officer.

She said this week that the office had trouble getting funeral homes to pick up bodies. In addition, she said, the process for releasing the bodies -- collecting fingerprints, gathering dental material to keep on file, and making last-ditch efforts to reach relatives -- was time-consuming.

But allegations of mismanagement at the medical examiner's office date back several years. In early 2005, Governor Mitt Romney hired Flomenbaum from the New York City medical examiner's office, where he had been the second- highest ranking forensic pathologist.

Under Flomenbaum's predecessor, Dr. Richard J. Evans, the medical examiner's office was under state and federal investigation following allegations in 2003 that it sent the wrong set of eyeballs out for testing during an autopsy and that it misidentified a fire victim's body, which was later cremated.

In addition, Evans was investigated by the State Ethics Commission and by the FBI.

In January 2006, nine months after he took over in Massachusetts, Flomenbaum told the Globe that "the enormity of the situation was more than what any individual expected" and that he had his work cut out for him.

He increased the staff of pathologists from five when he took office to 11 in March. He also hired investigators who went to the scene of all unattended or suspicious deaths and increased the number of autopsies.

The office, which has about 65 employees, increased the number of autopsies from 2,694 in 2005 to 3,552 last year, Izzi said.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com, and John R. Ellement at ellement@globe.com.