NEW YORK – The Medical Examiner's Office in New York took a deceased woman's brain -- and allegedly lost it -- as it carries out an anguish-causing new policy to tell next-of-kin on the eve of a funeral that organs were removed.
A woman whose sibling died of an unexplained illness in January learned just before the funeral that the ME had removed her brain during an autopsy and would keep it at least three weeks "for further testing."
It was too late to delay the memorial service, so the distraught woman decided to bury her sister, in her 60s, without her brain.
Last week, the woman still had not received her sister's death certificate, autopsy report or brain, funeral director Alexandra Mosca, who handled the arrangements, said.
When Mosca called the Brooklyn Medical Examiner's Office to inquire, "they couldn't find this particular brain," she said.
"Where is it?" she added. "Nobody knows. They said they would have to locate it and get back to me."
She called again two days later and was told "they found the brain after all," Mosca said. "That was because I made such a ruckus about it."
But now the woman -- still grieving -- does not know whether to exhume her sister and bury her again with the brain, bury the brain next to her sister's coffin or let the medical examiner dispose of it.
Mindless city officials are adding to mourners' grief, Mosca contends.
"They're putting people in an untenable position: What do you do?" she said.
In ice-cold letters handed to funeral directors when they pick up bodies, the ME gives next-of-kin several options: give up claim to the organ, leave the body in the morgue until the organ is released or pick up the organ later.
The woman whose sister died checked off the final option offered, "I am unable to make a decision ... at this time." But if a decision is not made within a week, the letter warns, "it will be understood I do not wish to claim the retained organ(s)."
An ME spokeswoman did not respond to questions, but denied the office lost a brain.
The hottest stories ripped from the headlines, from crime to courts, legal and scandal.
