County Medical Examiner's Office Posting Information On John Doe Bodies Online

By Chuck Sudo in News on Mar 8, 2013 4:45PM

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office began posting information Wednesday — including, in some cases, photos — of unidentified persons in its morgue on its website. The move is part of a revamping of the office’s website Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Cina hopes will better explain what his office does and serve as a way to help families locate lost relatives.

Cina formed a committee to help revamp the website and worked with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons website to set up the new Internet presence. Cina told the Tribune the information on unidentified bodies includes physical descriptions and details about what clothing they wore. In the case of cases with photos, Cina said his office worked to discourage people from downloading them. The Medical Examiner’s office also has information on its website on identified bodies waiting to be claimed by families.

The revamped website comes on the heels of reports last year on overcrowding in the county morgue. The morgue, with a capacity of storing 300 bodies, was found to have storage trays with, in some cases, more than one body on them. Others bodies were wrapped in tarps and stacked atop another, leading then-Medical Examiner Dr. Nancy Jones to write a decree that any bodies unclaimed bodies left in the morgue over two weeks would be donated to the Anatomic Gift Association. The problem ran deeper than the morgue. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said last year more than 12,000 indigent and unclaimed bodies have been buried in mass graves at Homewood Memorial Gardens since 1980 and that poor record keeping by the county make it virtually impossible for them to locate and identify the bodies.