Wrong woman buried after morgue mix-up

CHICAGO -- Two grieving families were shocked to discover recently that their loved ones' bodies, which were driven to the county morgue in the same van, had been mistakenly swapped and sent to the wrong funeral homes.

One of the families buried the wrong person in their mother's grave, while the other family noticed the error when they viewed the body in an open casket.

Roger Taylor, whose sister Vivian Fairman died on April 21, said he asked an attendant at the funeral home if they were at the wrong chapel.

"I said, 'Miss, that's not my sister,"' Taylor said. "We were just confounded. It still hurts."

The fault lies with a city contractor hired to transport the dead to the morgue, said Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue.

GSSP Enterprise Inc. of Chicago appears to have violated rules against transporting more than one body at a time, he added.

"When they arrived, we handed them the toe tag and paperwork, and they put the tags on the wrong bodies," Donoghue said.

GSSP won a $1.4 million contract last July under a city pilot program. The Chicago Police Department previously handled the job of delivering bodies to the morgue.

GSSP officials could not be reached for comment Sunday. A listing for the company could not be found in local telephone directories and a phone number found on the Internet was disconnected.

Similarities in the dead women may have contributed to the error, the medical examiner said.

"If one had been a male and if one had been white, of course, this wouldn't have occurred," Donoghue said. "But they were two black females, and they were about 10 years apart. We've told the families we were very sorry for the mistake."

Donoghue said the mix-up began when GSSP picked up the body of Vivian Fairman, 69, who had been discovered dead from a heart attack in her Chicago apartment by her brother.

The same GSSP van then answered another call to pick up the body of South Side resident Tonia Battle, 62, who also died of natural causes, Donoghue said.

At the request of Fairman's family, Spencer Leak & Sons Funeral Home picked up a body at the morgue identified as Vivian Fairman. But when the family came to view the body, they found a stranger (Battle) in the casket.

Meanwhile, A.A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home had picked up Fairman's body, identified as Tonia Battle.

After the mix-up was discovered by Fairman's family, Battle's body was returned to the morgue. Fairman's body was disinterred from Mount Hope Cemetery in Blue Island and is now buried in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip. Her funeral was performed on May 2 without her body.