Mistakenly sent from a Bronx morgue.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: The city of New York has paid $115,000 settlement to the children of a woman whose corpse was mistakenly sent from a Bronx morgue to a medical school, where it almost ended up on a dissecting table.
Aura Ballesteros, 85, died in her sleep May 2014 at a nursing home after years of battling heart disease and dementia, the Daily News reported. After she passed away, the city medical examiner’s office told her three children that they would hold her remains until June 16 so he could make funeral arrangements.
However, on June 3, Hector Ballesteros — the deceased’s son — got a notification that his mother’s corpse had been shipped to Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
As it turned out, a clerk at the morgue did not get the message that the body was to be held. Under state law, if a corpse is not claimed after 14 days, the medical examiner can ship the remains out for burial, or to a medical school for research, which is what occurred in Ballesteros’ case.
Ballesteros wasn’t part of a dissection, but she had been embalmed, disclosed the medical examiner’s office.
According to the Daily News’ account, a “grief-stricken” Hector Ballesteros testified at a city hearing about the “gruesome” task of identifying his mother, “whose face he no longer recognized.”
The whole face was inflated, totally inflated,†he said, according to a transcript of the proceeding. ” “The lips were closed with stitches … there was a very wide incision on her neck .. the nose, I don’t know exactly what happened with the nose because she had a nose that was big up front, but now it was like small, and open holes to breathe were wide open.”
“The body itself totally inflated on the left side, the right side was like empty, like all the organs were moved to the left side,†he continued.
The medical examiner’s office said a new state law is pending that would require family consent before releasing a body to a medical or embalming school, reported NBC News.