SAD: A mournful Justyna Sliwa deals with the grief of her stillborn child after a mistake led to the burial of the wrong body in Poland (inset). She’ll now return to Poland with the correct body. (
)
“Angel” is flying home.
A Brooklyn couple has received the body of their stillborn baby — two months after a mix-up at the city Medical Examiner’s Office resulted in them burying someone else’s child in their native Poland.
Justyna and Rafal Sliwa are flying out to Poland Tuesday with the body of the baby boy they were never able to meet so he can finally be laid to rest.
“I’m happy to have my son back, but it’s just horrible what they did to us,” a tearful Justyna told The Post at a memorial for the baby last night in Greenpoint. “It’s like a nightmare that won’t stop.”
In the meantime, their lawyer, Susan Karten, the ME’s Office, the Mayor’s Office and the Polish Embassy have been working feverishly to get the still-unidentified baby disinterred and returned to the United States.
“There’s a lot of red tape in getting Poland to exhume the second baby and get it shipped back here,” Karten said.
Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the ME, said her office is “taking care of any costs” incurred.
The horrible mix-up happened in June. Justyna was five months’ pregnant with her second child when an ultrasound revealed the baby’s heart had stopped.
She was sent to Bellevue Hospital, where doctors induced delivery and asked what she wanted done with the remains. The Roman Catholic mom said she wanted them sent to her family’s burial plot in her native Poland.
She also signed papers saying she wanted a copy of the baby’s footprints and to be told its gender. They had named the child Angel but changed it to Kaspar after learning he was a boy.
They held a memorial service in Brooklyn on June 16, and the body was sent to the couple’s hometown of Lomza, northeast of Warsaw.
A funeral service was held on June 19.
Justyna was in too much physical pain to go, but she designed a heart-shaped monument for the grave, which read, in part, “Before you were ever here with us, before we got to meet you, you walked away to heaven.”
Weeks later, the ME’s Office told them that there had been a “tragic, unfortunate error” and that they had been given the wrong remains.
Borakove said the incident is under investigation but that the Sliwas and the parents of the other baby had “strikingly similar names.” The other family was notified of the mix-up at the same time as the Sliwas, but Borakove declined to identify them, citing privacy reasons.
The Sliwas have filed a $5 million notice of claim against the city, the first step to filing suit. “We want heads to roll,” Karten said.