‘it was a graveyard smash’
He’ll “face discipline” but of what kind?
HAMILTON, Ohio (AP) — The family of a woman who died in an apartment fire was given the wrong body, and the mistake was not discovered until after they buried her, an Ohio coroner’s office said.
Butler County Coroner Richard Burkhardt said Wednesday his office takes responsibility for the mix-up.
“It is our fault,” he said. “It is our responsibility and we apologize to the families involved.”
‘i’ll be down in a few moments, just as quick as i can.’
Deborah Reed, 52, died in the fire Friday. But the coroner’s office, about 20 miles north of Cincinnati, released the body of a 23-year-old woman who died of a drug overdose Saturday, Burkhardt said.
It was not clear how the mistake happened. Burkhardt, who ordered that the younger woman’s body be exhumed, said an employee in his office will face discipline.
Tom Zettler, managing director of Zettler Funeral Home, said it is not his policy to check on the bodies of fire victims.
“You trust the coroner to determine the cause of death and so forth, and that the correct body would be released,” Zettler said.
Reed’s son, Brian Winkle, said family members did not look at the body before burial, and apparently no one else did either.
Winkle said a family member learned of the mix-up after receiving a call from a friend who lives next to the cemetery. The friend said a body was being exhumed by detectives and the coroner’s office.
“I came out here and asked a couple of people who work for the cemetery. They were covering up the hole,” Winkle said. “One of them finally told me apparently the woman buried wasn’t my mother.”
And for those of you who haven’t seen it, watch this immediately! It’s one of the greatest movies ever made:
The funeral business gets a giant raspberry in this wickedly wacky, resplendently ridiculous farce based on Evelyn Waugh’s macabre comic masterpiece and directed with inspired verve by Tony Richardson (Tom Jones). But the American way of death isn’t the film’s only target: sex, greed, religion and mother love are also in the crosshairs of its satirical shots. Robert Morse plays a bemused would-be poet who gets entangled with an unctuous cemetery entrepreneur (Jonathan Winters), a mom-obsessed mortician (Rod Steiger) and other bizarre characters played by such adept farceurs as John Gielgud, Robert Morley, Tab Hunter, Milton Berle, James Coburn and Liberace.
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Richardson’s film was advertised as the movie with something to offend everyone, and although these days it looks pretty tame you can see how it would have had the censors up in arms 35 years ago. Morse is the Brit abroad who encounters all the worst aspects of the funeral business while attending to his uncle’s burial in California - he falls for a cosmetologist, but has to compete with a grotesque embalmer (Steiger). With a disparate cast including Sir John Gielgud, Tab Hunter and Liberace, Richardson’s film is an outrageously funny parody of southern California life, with Steiger at his most memorable.
Rod Steiger as “Mr. Joyboy” - I met him once and told him, “I LOVE Mr. Joyboy!” and he looked at me, horrifed.
