Victimized by medical examiner: The Shipleys learned the city had kept their son’s brain only when his classmates spotted it at the morgue, months after the funeral. (Christopher Sadowski)
Why is the Bloomberg administration obsessed with collecting brains?
As reported in a Sunday Post exclusive, there are now three known cases where the city Medical Examiner returned an autopsied body to the family with the brain missing.
It took a $1 million court judgment — now on appeal — for the city to adopt a policy of even informing loved ones that it was keeping the brain.
But it’s still a needlessly cruel policy. Now the ME hands the family a coldhearted form that offers three choices: 1) take the partial remains and give up any claim to the brain; 2) leave the body in the morgue until the ME is ready to release the brain, too, or 3) take the body and pick up the brain later.
Thus, as The Post reported Sunday, a woman whose sister died of unexplained illness in January got handed the form after she’d already made memorial arrangements and felt obliged to check off: “I am unable to make a decision at this time.” The letter warns she’d forfeit the brain in a week if a decision wasn’t made. Worse, the city still wasn’t even sure where it was — two months later.
As funeral director Alexandra Mosca told The Post, she called the Brooklyn Medical Examiner’s Office to inquire, and was told no one knew where it was; “They said they would have to locate it and get back to me.” When she rang two days later, they’d found it — and she believes “that was because I made such a ruckus about it.” (The city denies losing the brain, even temporarily.)
This is no kind of choice. Who can wait what could be months to bury a loved one? What right does the city have to force the next-of-kin to choose between forsaking deeply held religious beliefs about an afterlife and waiting months to bury a loved one?
Especially when the ME is removing brains “for further study” when it’s absolutely clear no crime was committed.
I asked Ronald Sternberg, the city lawyer in charge on this, why the ME is doing it. He “explained” that the courts have only ruled that the city must tell the family when the brain is missing, not that the ME lacks authority to remove the brain.
When I pushed for an explanation of why removing the brain is necessary, he said that the ME wanted to determine the precise cause of death.
But what difference does it make whether someone who dies in a car crash has his heart give out a minute before his brain stops functioning or vice versa? How is that more important than a family’s religious beliefs or the anguish they suffer as a result of this moronic policy?
That the city has so many brains it can’t keep track of them tells us that there are many other cases than the three we know about. The other two cases are telling.
The family of 11-year-old Vasean Alleyne only learned of the missing brain when they read the autopsy report months after the funeral. The family of Jesse Shipley, 17, only discovered the truth when their late son’s classmates saw the brain in a specimen jar while on a field trip to the morgue.
In both cases, the family eventually retrieved their son’s brain, exhumed his body and reburied it with the brain. The Shipleys had to wage a long court fight to recover the organ.
City lawyers’ cold tactics included trying to argue that the Alleyne family sued too late — insisting that the family had to sue within 90 days of the autopsy, rather than the date it received the report.
In the Shipley case, the ME unbelievably claimed he had the right to hold the brain “until I have six brains and then it’s kind of worth [the brain-dissecting doctor’s] while to make the trip.”
The city is causing great pain and anguish to innocent people — then fighting those people when they seek a fair recovery, all at taxpayers’ expense.
It’s tragic and makes no sense.
Mayor Bloomberg should order the policy to change. Brains should not be removed for further study unless doing so is part of a criminal investigation or other compelling public need.
Cruel government forms and callous lawyering are no answers.
Stephen B. Meister is a partner at Meister, Seelig & Fein LLP.