The problems at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner haven't gone away with the departure of Mark Flomenbaum. In December, someone at the office picked up the wrong body from a Brockton hospital.
While the incident didn't go quite as far as the wrong body winding up in someone else's grave, the employee was clearly confused. Luckily, someone at the South Boston office realized they had the wrong person and returned the body to the hospital.
The office at least had a decent excuse--the bodies that got mixed up belonged to two elderly women, and they were both named Dorothy, WCVB reports.
However, you'd think that, after all the fuss about incompetence at the medical examiner's office, they might be more careful about picking up the right body, at least for PR's sake.
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The incident of picking up the wrong body from the hospital clearly demonstrates that the staff of the Medical Examiner's office does not follow procedures, certainly not the rigorous kinds of procedures that Dr. Flomenbaum was trying to institute and enforce. Dr. Flomenbaum did not cause the problems in the office - he was trying to fix them. However, when the staff resisted his authority and leadership, and he was undermined by the EOPS bureacracy above him, the eventual outcome was no shock. The Executive Office of Public Safety now has to live with and own up to the mess it has made, and will have to continue living with a dysfunctional ME system that will not be able to attract a quality chief for the foreseeable future. It is the people of the Commonwealth who will surely suffer in the end.