The city Medical Examiner’s Office is a mess — plagued with errors, including bodies being lost, mistakenly cremated or wrongly donated to science — while millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on plans and equipment useful only in a mass disaster.
The office has received $ 19.6 million in federal Homeland Security grants since 2005, The Post has learned.
But it refuses to detail how it has spent the funds and has failed to release any records, violating a Post request submitted under the Freedom of Information Law last August.
Documents from the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services provide a limited look at the spending, and it suggests most of the funds were wasted.
The ME’s Office hired consultants and stocked up on supplies that go unused. It stashes six trailers loaded with disaster gear in a lot under the FDR Drive. The lot also houses a white 18-wheel tractor-trailer and a mobile office for “logistics staging.”
The ME boasts an RV-size “mobile command unit” stocked with cameras, satellite, cellular and video equipment, plus devices to detect chemical, biological or radioactive materials, a trade magazine reported.
“This is overkill, a waste of taxpayer money, ” a veteran staffer complained. “We’re not first responders. We take direction from police or fire. We pick up the bodies.”
Millions of dollars went to create a Universal Victim Identification System, a database to catalog the dead in the event of an airplane crash, flu pandemic or terrorist attack.
Meanwhile, insiders say ME chiefs, caught up in the glamor of disaster, neglect the agency’s primary mission.
“They can’t take care of day-to-day business. They play war games,” one said.
The ME’s Office, with 625 employees and a $ 63.6 million budget, has a history of criminality, waste and incompetence.
Hector Lopez holds a photo of his mother, Aura Ballesteros, whose body sent to an anatomy class in error by the ME.Photo: Brian Zak
The ME’s former chief of management information systems, Natarajan “Raju” Venkataram, and his co-worker girlfriend, Rosa Abreu, were busted in 2005 for embezzling more than $ 9 million from a $ 11.4 million FEMA grant meant to track and identify remains of 9/11 victims.
And bosses take lavish taxpayer-funded trips to conferences and symposiums.
Frank DePaolo, assistant commissioner for emergency management, has traveled to Las Vegas, the Hague, Hong Kong and Israel. Chief of Staff Barbara Butcher has gone to Croatia and Thailand.
The two bosses have embarrassed the agency.
Days after 9/11, Butcher took home a Ground Zero souvenir — a jet exit-door handle she remarked would “make for good conversation on the coffee table,” a witness reported.
She said she gave it back, but “could not recall” to whom. She was promoted and got a pay hike to $ 166,879 a year.
DePaolo, who made $ 160,380 last year, left a laptop that held 200 to 300 photos of body parts from 9/11 and other victims and city disaster plans in his agency-issued SUV. The computer was stolen from the vehicle.
DePaolo’s pet projects have been spared no expense, while ME brass “gutted” units that handle daily cases, staffers said.
Assistant commissioner Frank DePaolo left a laptop with 200 to 300 photos of body parts from 9/11 in his truck, which was stolen.Photo: Getty Images
The number of investigators, who examine bodies at death scenes, was slashed from about 40 to 20, among other cuts, they said.
“We’re told to do more with less, but the work is suffering,” one said.
Mid-level employees have been suspended or forced to quit over body bungles. The office recently installed video cameras and microphones in at least one morgue to keep tabs on employees.
“Yet management created this mess, and no one is holding the executives responsible,” the staffer said.
Insiders cite a spate of mind-boggling blunders as evidence the agency is badly managed:
- In June 2013, The Post caught an ME crew stuffing the body of Bronx hit-and-run victim Kevin Bell, 26, into a van loaded with grimy bags of recyclables.
- The ME’s Office has removed brains and other organs from bodies without telling the next of kin who retrieve them for burial.
- “Their conduct has been totally outrageous and callous towards people who have suffered tragedy,” said Paul Weitz, a lawyer for the mother of Vasean Alleyne, 11, who was killed by a drunken driver in Queens. Months after Vasean’s burial, she read his autopsy report and was shocked to learn the ME had kept his brain and spinal cord.
- Body handling is also botched. The city Department of Investigation says it is now probing the “custody and release of deceased individuals.”
Last weekend, a New York woman had to be dug out of a grave in New Jersey after her body was released to the wrong funeral home.
Last September, the ME’s Office lost the body of a 71-year-old Upper West Side woman. It dug up 300 graves in a Bronx potter’s field in a failed attempt to find her remains.
The office recently sent the wrong man’s body to a crematorium — twice.
In April, it gave a Bronx man’s body to a Manhattan mortuary school, where it was embalmed by students, his family learned.
In June, it mistakenly shipped Aura Ballesteros, 85, to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine for anatomy classes, while her son, Hector Lopez, made funeral arrangements.
Her body was returned three days later — with embalming devices attached, blood spatters and stitches on her lips and neck.
“It was terrible mistake and caused me so much trauma added to her death,” said Lopez, who has hired civil-rights lawyer Sanford Rubenstein to sue. “As of today, I have not received a formal apology.”
Additional reporting by Philip Messing
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