Cook County Morgue,Chicago Ill.

Cook County Morgue Still Holding Bodies From ’06

Bodies From 2006 Still HeldCHICAGO (AP) ?

 

 

Cook County’s chief medical examiner, Nancy Jones, acknowledges that the tale of the missing body doesn’t cast her office in the best light.

The remains of 64-year-old Rosalie Schultz went missing inside the county morgue for more than a day this spring. As her horrified family waited, morgue staff scrambled to locate Schultz’s body, eventually finding it behind a larger body in a cooler that had reached capacity.

The morgue held at least 250 bodies, 75 percent of them unclaimed, even before the beginning of summer, its busiest season. Since the macabre mishap, the situation hasn’t improved; as of late September, the cooler held 258 bodies — including 13 that have been there since 2006, according to morgue officials.

Jones blames a slow economy, but said there still was room for more bodies.

“Funerals are expensive,” she said. “Families do not have the money to bury their loved ones, so the county is going to have to take care of more bodies than they have in the past.”

But former Chief Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue and former assistant administrator Michael Boehmer say the incident hints at bigger troubles: a morgue that has become worse-equipped to handle an emergency. Schultz’s disappearance might not have gained much notice elsewhere. But here, her death — one of the first attributed to heat this year — and the overcrowding it exposed were a reminder of the chaotic summer of 1995, when a heat wave killed more than 700 people in less than a week.

That emergency taught Chicago a valuable, if deadly, lesson, and temperatures above 90 degrees now trigger an emergency plan that includes city workers calling and visiting the frail and elderly. Although the morgue could hold an influx of bodies by bringing in refrigerated trucks, as it did in 1995, it has 20 fewer employees than it did 12 years ago, down to 100 this year. And the county has cut the office budget, $73,000 in the last year alone.