Headlines throughout the country and around the world blared the news of unclaimed corpses stacking up at the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office, indicating that just when Detroiters and the nation thought things couldn’t get worse — they were. The morgue’s overcrowded situation at one point compelled the examiner’s office — whose Warren Avenue facility has the capacity to store 200 bodies — to resort to drastic, albeit morbid measures — to house bodies outside of the facility in a refrigerated trailer for containment until a more permanent solution for corpse overflow could be identified.
While reports of the morgue’s dilemma were not particularly exaggerated, the Detroit region was conspicuously singled out as the only metropolis facing the peculiar problem. The implication being that the beleaguered Motor City was literally approaching it’s final demise. “Over the past year our storage capacity was tested simply because of the economy being what it is. Consequently, people didn’t pick up and bury their loved ones … not because they didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t afford it in a lot of cases. … I’ve received phone calls from coast to coast, and other cities like Las Vegas and Chicago are having the same problem. Madison, Wis., is having the same problem, but they’re not getting the print. Our counterpart, Oakland County, is one of the richest counties in the country and they are experiencing similar problems,” says Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office.
Other issues affecting the treatment of a body in the morgue system include product liability, probate procedures, familial relationships and issues regarding court testimony and cause of death.”We triage 13,000 bodies per year and of those 13,000 death calls, we bring in approximately 4,000 bodies to this facility annually or 10 to 12 daily. … And of those 50–60 bodies a year are not identified,” says Samuels.
The retired police officer-turned-medical examiner investigator expressed a measure of relief in that the news of the body storage problem compelled concerned citizens to act through individual and collective donations to cover the $750 burial costs for unclaimed bodies. “The thing that separates us from animals is that we bury our dead, so we have to come up with some solutions. … One of the things that has come out of this story is that people are more aware of the human side to the story. It’s not the entertainment that you see on the television ‘CSI’ shows,” concludes Samuels.
The Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office was constructed in 1995 and is currently undergoing a comprehensive upgrade and building expansion.–roz edward
