Relatives of a New Amster-dam man, who was buried by police on Wednesday before he could be identified, are seeking to have his body exhumed so that an autopsy could be performed to determine his cause of death.
Ivor Gomes, 41, of Asylum Street, New Amsterdam was last seen by relatives on Sunday. Nicola Gomes said her brother was dropped off at the funeral of a colleague that day by their stepbrother in Port Mourant. The man was never heard from again and his relatives learnt of his death after reading an article in yesterday’s edition of the Kaieteur News. It was accompanied by a photo of Ivor Gomes’s face and a caption which said that police needed help in identifying the man, Nicola said.
“My brother is an ex-police officer and he was also a driver at the Triplets Taxi Service in New Amsterdam so it is strange that they couldn’t identify him,” Nicola said. “What is even more upsetting is that they gave us little or no time at all to identify him.”
The Berbice Crime Chief, according to Nicola, met her and other relatives yesterday and told them that Ivor’s body was discovered in Albion. She said a businessman told her he had seen her brother staggering shortly before he collapsed. His body was subsequently picked up and taken to the New Amsterdam Hospital Mortuary. However, the woman said she was informed that the morgue’s cold storage system had not been working and police subsequently buried Ivor.
She said officials at the New Amsterdam Hospital told her that her brother’s body was taken to the morgue late Sunday night. The porter who took the body from the hearse to the morgue, Nicola further reported, has since said that the police did not accompany the hearse.
“The porter said that in cases where police collect a body, they usually send an officer along with it to the morgue but they didn’t send nobody with my brother’s body,” she told Stabroek News. A post-mortem examination, Nicola said, she also learnt from the police, was not conducted on Ivor’s body.
“They told me that the doctor only looked over his body for marks of violence and after he found none they buried him. But he died and we want a cause of death so we are trying to have the body exhumed.”
The woman said police also told her that they took Ivor’s body to the morgue on Sunday night. However, when this newspaper spoke with Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the New Amsterdam Hospital Leslie Cadogan yesterday, he said that according to hospital records Ivor’s body was taken to the hospital on Tuesday. According to Cadogan, the body should not have been taken to the morgue because it had already started to deteriorate. On Wednesday morning, Cadogan told this newspaper, police were informed of the situation and told that the body could not be kept in the morgue. It was police, the CEO said, who then made arrangements to have the man’s body removed and buried. “At no time when that man’s body was in the morgue did we have problems with our cool storage system,” Cadogan stressed.
However, he later admitted that some time during yesterday there was a problem with the morgue’s storage system but this was immediately rectified. Meanwhile, earlier this month the New Amsterdam hospital morgue also refused to take the badly decomposed bodies of fisherman, Teshwar Madramootoo, 39, of Kilcoy Squatting Area, Corentyne and remigrant Elsie Nieuenkirk of New Winkle Road, New Amsterdam.
Madramootoo’s body was placed in a box with ice at the old New Amsterdam Hospital mortuary after funeral homes refused to keep it because of its state. Nieuenkirk’s body was later accepted by the Lyken’s funeral home.
Residents had complained bitterly that they had been forced to endure the strong stench emanating from Madramootoo’s body that had also attracted a lot of flies. According to them, the mortuary along with the old hospital building, which vandals had stripped of its roof and sections of the walls, was not in working condition.
An official from the New Amsterdam hospital had told this newspaper that he was not aware of the body being taken to the old mortuary. The same official had later added that the new morgue does not have the facilities to store bodies which are in a decomposing state. This was reiterated by the New Amsterdam Hospital CEO Cadogan yesterday.
“We don’t accept bodies in that state because we can’t store them,” Cadogan told Stabroek News yesterday.
