Medical examiner faces new troubles

Worcester technician released wrong body

The state medical examiner's office released the wrong body to a Worcester funeral home the day after Christmas, then discovered the mistake at a cemetery three days later, shortly before the man's remains were to be cremated, state officials said.

It was the latest embarrassment for the long troubled medical examiner's office, coming 17 months after Governor Deval Patrick fired chief medical examiner Dr. Mark A. Flomenbaum after his staff temporarily misplaced a body.

"There is no excuse for this," said John A. Grossman, the public safety undersecretary of forensic science and technology, confirming during a telephone interview yesterday that a technician at the medical examiner's office in Worcester released the wrong body to a local funeral home Dec. 26.

The technician has been suspended for five days and transferred from the medical examiner's small Worcester office, where he occasionally worked alone, to the Boston office, where he'll get more supervision, Grossman said. He declined to identify the technician.

Grossman, who has been overseeing an overhaul of the medical examiner's office, said the man's body was correctly marked at the morgue, but the technician failed to check the identification when releasing it to a funeral home employee who came to collect the remains of another man.

The funeral home worker also failed to verify the remains, he said.

The mistake was discovered three days later at Rural Cemetery in Worcester when a forensic nurse contracted by the medical examiner's office was conducting a routine examination of the body before it was to be cremated.

"So no mistakes were made that we couldn't fix," Grossman said, adding that the medical examiner's office immediately retrieved the body.

He said the families of the two deceased men were unaware of the mix-up before it was detected by the nurse, but were notified afterward.

He declined to identify the two deceased men or the funeral home, citing privacy concerns.

"He made a mistake," Grossman said, adding that state officials decided to suspend, rather than fire, the technician after consulting with legal counsel and considering that he had been a trusted employee with a clean record and had owned up to what he'd done.

"There was no attempt to cover up as there was a year and a half ago," Grossman said, referring to the missing body debacle and a host of other problems that led to the firing of Flomenbaum and a contentious legal battle in which Flomenbaum sued to keep his job.

The governor fired Flomenbaum in August 2007, four months after his office misplaced the body of a Cape Cod man. State Police later found the remains buried in another man's grave.

It was also revealed that an increase in autopsies caused unclaimed bodies to pile up in the agency's Boston headquarters and in a refrigerated truck parked behind the South End building.

In a scathing report released two days after Flomenbaum's dismissal, a consulting firm hired by the state found the office was on the "verge of collapse" from extreme mismanagement.

Flomenbaum, who had uprooted his family from Connecticut to take the medical examiner's job in January 2005, sued to keep the post. He argued that he had signed a five-year contract with then-Governor Mitt Romney and inherited a beleaguered office that had suffered from years of underfunding.

Last July, the state's Supreme Judicial Court unanimously upheld Patrick's dismissal of Flomenbaum, concluding there were "serious problems" concerning Flomenbaum's administrative and managerial duties.

Problems at the medical examiner's office continued after Flomenbaum's departure.

Last January, a technician from the state medical examiner's office picked up the wrong body from a Brockton hospital.

The medical examiner's office in Boston realized the mistake when the elderly woman's remains arrived, then immediately returned them to the hospital. The deceased women had similar names, state officials said.

Yesterday, Grossman said a system of checks and balances put in place the past couple of years is working, resulting in the discovery of the technician's mistake last month.

"We have systems in place and the systems worked here, but our systems rely on human beings," said Grossman.

He said state officials are reviewing training and other procedures to make sure mistakes aren't repeated.

"A memo has gone out to make it clear going forward that failure to perform this basic core task will be cause for immediate termination," Grossman said.

Jonathan Saltzman of the Globe staff contributed to this report.