The Medical Examiner’s Office has lost the body of an Upper West Side woman — and is now digging up dozens of corpses at a Bronx potter’s field to find her, The Post has learned.
Rebecca Alper, 71, killed herself in her West 72nd Street home last September.
Her corpse went unclaimed at the morgue, and she was apparently buried at City Cemetery on Hart Island, off The Bronx in the Long Island Sound.
But when a relative inquired after her remains last week, the Medical Examiner’s Officer couldn’t find any paperwork on her and realized she was missing, the source said.
They rapidly began exhuming bodies. They may have to dig up as many as 70 because Alper’s remains are likely buried under another name, the source said.
“They’re running around in circles on this,” the source said. “They don’t know what to do. They’ve been trying to keep this under wraps.”
Asked how the office could lose all of a person’s paperwork, the source said, “I have no idea, but sheer incompetence is a good bet.”
A spokeswoman for the Medical Examiner’s Office admitted to the mix-up and said it was trying to find Alper’s remains.
“The family has been notified,” said the spokeswoman, Julie Bolcer, adding that the office was “actively investigating.”
Alper’s husband had died several years earlier, and she was been living alone when she took her life, apparently by cutting herself several times.
Before her suicide, Alper seemed a happy person, said Eddy Rodriguez, her building’s handyman.
“I would make her laugh. She would call me ‘kiddo.’ ‘Hey, kiddo,’ she would say,” he recalled.
The blunder was only the latest embarrassment for the Medical Examiner’s Office at the cemetery.
The Post reported in February that 75 people who were anonymously buried in the potter’s field up to 24 years ago had been identified — but most of their families don’t know it.
Officials used high-tech means to identify 81 people but have tracked down only six of the families.
“It’s an embarrassment,’’ Charles Eric-Gordon, a lawyer who helps locate relatives of the dead, had said.
Additional reporting by Jamie Schram & Bob Fredericks