A southern California man who thought he had buried his son found out 11 days later that the son was still alive, after local coroners misidentified a body.
On 6 May, a man was found dead behind a Verizon store in Fountain Valley. Frank J Kerrigan, 82, of Wildomar, said he called the coroner’s office and was told the body was that of his son, Frank M Kerrigan, 57, who suffers from mental illness and had been living on the street.
When Kerrigan asked whether he should identify the body, a woman said – apparently incorrectly – that identification had been made through fingerprints.
“When somebody tells me my son is dead, when they have fingerprints, I believe them,” Kerrigan said. “If he wasn’t identified by fingerprints I would been there in heartbeat.”
Kerrigan’s daughter, 56-year-old Carole Meikle of Silverado, went to the spot where the body was found to leave a photo of her brother, a candle, flowers and rosary beads.
“It was a very difficult situation for me to stand at a pretty disturbing scene,” she said. “There was blood and dirty blankets.
On 12 May, the family held a $20,000 funeral that drew about 50 people from as far away as Las Vegas and Washington state.
“We thought we were burying our brother,” Meikle said. “Someone else had a beautiful sendoff. It’s horrific.”
The body was interred at a cemetery in Orange about 150 miles from where Kerrigan’s wife is buried. Earlier, in the funeral home, the grieving Kerrigan had looked at the man in the casket and touched his hair, convinced he was looking at his son.
“I didn’t know what my dead son was going to look like,” he said.
Eleven days later, Frank Kerrigan got a call from a friend.
“Your son is alive,” Kerrigan reported the friend, Bill Shinker, as saying. “Bill put my son on the phone,” Kerrigan said. “He said, ‘Hi Dad.’”
Orange County coroner’s officials had misidentified the body, the Orange County Register reported on Friday.
Doug Easton, an attorney hired by Kerrigan, said officials apparently were not able to match the corpse’s fingerprints through a law enforcement database and instead identified Kerrigan using an old driver’s license photo. When the family told authorities he was alive, officials tried the fingerprints again and on 1 June learned they matched someone else, Meikle said.
Easton said the coroner’s office provided the Kerrigan family with a name of that person, but the identification had not been independently confirmed. The attorney said the family planned to sue, alleging authorities did not properly try to identify the body as Kerrigan’s son, because he is homeless.
A spokesman for the coroner’s office declined to comment because an investigation was under way.
The mistaken death identification led the federal government to stop disability payments for her brother, Meikle said. The family is working to restore them.
Meikle said her brother chose to return to living on the street and doesn’t understand how hard the mistake was on his family.
“We lived through our worst fear,” she said. “He was dead on the sidewalk. We buried him. Those feelings don’t go away.”