Blundering officials at the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office have made another grave error — shipping the body of a Bronx man to a mortuary school, where students embalmed it without permission from his family, The Post has learned.
Adding insult to injury, the ME also failed for four months to tell Dennis Salisbury’s relatives that he was dead. They didn’t find out until another city agency delivered the sad news, according to his outraged niece, Virginia Allie.
“My family is sickened over this,’’ she said. “Families should not have to go through this garbage.”
The city Department of Investigation began a probe of the agency after an earlier series of screw-ups, including the loss of one corpse, another being accidentally cremated and a third that was mistakenly donated to science.
Salisbury, 64, was admitted to Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx on Feb. 14 and died a week later of heart failure. Jacobi claims it had no contact number for him, and workers turned over his body to the medical examiner on March 12.
It’s unclear what efforts the agency made for an ID, but the ME’s Office launched a program in October to fingerprint all corpses, so it should have gotten a hit from Salisbury’s Navy stint.
On April 3, the ME sent the body to the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service in Manhattan, where the embalming took place.
The Public Administrator’s Office in The Bronx finally notified the family of the death on June 12.
Allie and other family members were incredulous to learn that the public administrator was able to find relatives, even though the ME’s Office claimed it could not.
The ME’s Office had told the family it had contacted Salisbury’s sister by phone a day earlier, on June 11, and left a message when no one answered.
But Allie, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., insisted it’s a lie. “There was no call and no message,” she said.
Julie Bolcer, an ME’s Office spokeswoman, declined to comment.