A distraught Queens mom plans to sue the city, saying the Medical Examiner’s Office mistakenly grabbed her son’s body from a funeral home — just an hour before his wake — and then brought him back for an autopsy to the very hospital that 12 years earlier had botched his birth.
“I’m reliving everything all over again from the time he was born,” said teary-eyed Nadia Heerah, 33, whose son Nicholas died on April 8 after a lifelong struggle with cerebral palsy.
The Heerahs won a $3 million settlement from Queens General Hospital due to the birth problem, where they say a Caesarean section wasn’t immediately performed when there were signs of hypoxia, or lack of oxygen to the baby.
“I never wanted to go back there. It’s very traumatizing,” Nadia told The Post.
But she returned more than a decade later to identify Nicholas’ body for re-release — after the doctors had removed the boy’s special burial clothing and performed an examination, Nadia said.
Staff at Jamaica Hospital, where Nicholas died from cardiac arrest, had said there was no need for an autopsy.
The coroner’s office eventually apologized. “They said they were so sorry for this. ‘Nicholas was not supposed to be here, this was a mistake,’ ” Nadia recounted.
“I’m reliving everything all over again from the time he was born… I never wanted to go back there.”
But the heartbroken mom wondered, “Why did we have to go through something like this?”
The delay also went against the family’s Hindu customs, which dictate that a body should be cremated within 24 hours of death, her attorney, Robert Vilensky, told The Post.
“To make a mistake like this is tragic,” he said.
“You released the body for the funeral home, tell the parent it’s OK to make arrangements and then come and snatch the child from the funeral home,” he said.
Vilensky plans to file a notice of claim with the city this week.
A spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner’s Office, Julie Bolcer, said, “We acted appropriately at every stage,” noting that the original death certificate was not complete, so the body had to be returned to Queens General.