Preckwinkle To Meet With Ministers Over Morgue Overcrowding
By Chuck Sudo in News on Jan 30, 2012 10:30PM
The reports of dead bodies stacking up at the Cook County Morgue are not going away anytime soon, nor should they.
County Board President Toni Preckwinkle told media last week that it could take weeks before she gets to the root cause of the mess at the morgue. Last week Preckwinkle appointed one of her staff members to go find out what's going on over there. Now one group of ministers have called on Preckwinkle to establish an independent commission to investigate why the morgue's corpse cooler is beyond its 300-body capacity.
Rev. Ira Acree told the Sun-Times, "If you don’t hold people’s feet to the fire, the problems don’t go away."
Morgue employees have been complaining for a month that their West Side facility has been piling up. In addition to the corpse cooler, morgue employees have complained that storage trays were full and in some cases had more than one body on them. Others bodies have been wrapped in tarps and stacked atop another. And this may have been happening for longer than a month. It's not hard to draw a straight line between the overcrowding at the morgue and the Sept. 27 memo from Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Nancy Jones that decreed bodies left in the morgue for longer than two weeks be donated to the Anatomic Gift Association if a family cannot afford a burial.
The problem may go deeper than the morgue. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart told Fox News Chicago in an interview Jan. 26 that the way the county handled paupers' burials are still coming back to haunt them. More than 12,000 indigent and unclaimed bodies have been buried in mass graves at Homewood Memorial Gardens since 1980. Dart told Fox News Chicago that poor record keeping by the county make it virtually impossible for them to locate and identify the bodies.
Dart said it was serendipitous that they found out about the Homewood Memorial Gardens mess. When the Sheriff's office was exhuming the remains of eight unidentified victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, he discovered they were buried by the county medical examiner in Homewood Memorial Gardens. This is a direct violation of a specific order. Dart came to the realization that some of these other John Doe cases will never be solved.
“There's about 50 years worth of missing people that you're never going to make that connection,” Dart said. “So, for individuals whose loved ones went missing and showed up at the Medical Examiner's office as an ‘unidentified,’ there's no way you're going to find your loved one. It's just not going to happen.”