Grand Jury Is Mistaken, Coroner Says

Responding to a critical report by the San Bernardino County Grand Jury, Coroner Brian McCormick rejected charges Wednesday that bodies are stacked two and three to a table, that boxes of cremated remains are piled on a desk and that the autopsy room has a foul odor due to poor ventilation.

McCormick, the county’s elected public administrator and coroner since 1982, suggested that the members of the grand jury who visited the facility last year didn’t understand the operations of a coroner’s office and probably exaggerated the conditions they saw.

“The public is being grossly misled,” he said of the grand jury report, which was released July 1.

Meanwhile, a new report surfaced Wednesday that said the coroner’s office had switched two bodies with the same last name, releasing the wrong corpse to a family in Texas for burial in 2001. The error wasn’t discovered for five months.

In its annual report, the grand jury described the coroner’s main facility as inadequate, with boxes of ashes stacked three to four high on a desk.

The report said the autopsy room was permeated with an offensive smell and the refrigerated storage room had bodies stacked two and three on a table.

The report also noted that personal items of the deceased were poorly organized and stacked in boxes up to 8 feet high.

McCormick said he plans to ask the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors for funding to expand the building next year. Still, he rejected most of the charges in the report, including the suggestion that his facilities were overcrowded.

He said the 27 boxes of ashes seen stacked on a desk were being tested as part of an investigation. The remains had been discovered abandoned in a garage. He said the ashes of indigent or unidentified bodies are usually stored at a warehouse.

McCormick said offensive smells are common in a morgue, especially if workers are performing an autopsy on a decomposing body.

In his written response to the grand jury, McCormick said the ventilation system was tested by the county’s Risk Management Department and found to exceed state and federal standards. He said bodies are never stacked in the refrigeration room.

After a news conference, McCormick gave reporters a tour of the facilities, including the 20-by-30-foot refrigeration room. Nearly 60 bodies, all enclosed in plastic body bags, were on shelves or rolling tables. On several tables and shelves, two bodies were laid alongside each other. None of the bodies were stacked on top of each other.

There was also no offensive smell in the autopsy room, where the autopsy of a murder victim had just been completed.

McCormick agreed that the system of storing belongings could be improved by using bar codes to keep track of items. But he said there have been no reports of lost or commingled property.

At the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, a spokesman said it is standard procedure to put two bodies alongside one another on a table for storage. “We try everything in our power to avoid stacking bodies,” said Craig Harvey, the Los Angeles County coroner’s chief of operations.

McCormick’s efforts to defend his department were made more difficult by news that his staff had mixed up the body of an African American man with the body of a Caucasian woman in 2001. The report first appeared in the Riverside Press-Enterprise on Wednesday.

Larry Buchanan, 49, of Fontana, died of diabetes and other health problems in April 2001. His body was kept at the coroner’s office awaiting pickup by a Los Angeles mortuary that was to send the body to Houston for burial.

But on April 18, when the mortuary firm arrived to pick up the body, a coroner’s technician instead released the body of Erma Buchanan, 54, who had died Nov. 18, 2000, of natural causes at Chino Valley Medical Center. Coroner’s officials were holding Erma Buchanan’s body until they could locate family members to claim it.

Unaware of the mix-up, Larry Buchanan’s family buried Erma Buchanan at a veterans cemetery in Houston. San Bernardino County coroner officials assume that the family never looked at the body to confirm the identity because they had been told it had begun to decompose.

According to Robert Shaw, lead supervising deputy coroner, the mix-up was discovered Sept. 10, 2001, when the technician who assumed he had released the body of Larry Buchanan to the mortuary five months earlier found the body still in the refrigeration room.

Shaw said the coroner’s office offered to retrieve Erma Buchanan’s body from Larry Buchanan’s burial plot and ship his body to Texas for a new burial. The cost to the coroner would be about $14,800, Shaw said. Larry Buchanan’s sister agreed but asked that the mix-up and the switch be kept a secret so as not to upset Larry’s mother, according to Shaw.

Erma Buchanan’s body has since been cremated but family members have not been located. Unless family members come forward, Shaw said Erma Buchanan will be buried in an unmarked grave with the remains of hundreds of other unnamed or unclaimed ashes.

McCormick declined to say whether the technician who made the mistake had been punished, but he said that now at least two coroner’s officials confirm the identity of a body before it is released.

The coroner’s office has faced other embarrassing incidents in recent years. In 1998, a senior deputy coroner confessed to taking cash, a gun and clothes from several bodies. An improved security system, including surveillance cameras, has since been installed.

In February, two contract workers hired to deliver bodies to the morgue were arrested on suspicion of allegedly sexually mutilating the body of a 4-year-old girl who had died of a seizure.