Relatives Bury Wrong Body

After relatives had buried Cambridge citizen Leonard C. Johnson last Saturday, they received a startling call from the Boston City Hospital Morgue.

They had buried the wrong body.

Morgue workers found Johnson during an inventory on Sunday and realized they had sent the wrong body to the funeral home. Medical Examiner Stanton C. Kessler called the family Sunday to tell them to the error.

The family held another funeral on Monday with Leonard Johnson's body. The other body, an unidentified Johnson, was exhumed from the plot at Cambridge Cemetery. The family does not know what happened to other body.

"What happened is just devastating. It's humiliating," said Clark Diva, brother-in-law of Johnson.

"It's a deep hurt for the family. I can't believe they would actually send a body to the funeral parlor and not know it was the wrong body," he said.

The casket was kept closed during the funeral, as morgue officials said the body was too decomposed.

Leonard Charles Johnson died on May 11 from a stroke, compounded by ethanol abuse, according to his death certificate. He was a 45-year-old Vietnam veteran living alone in a rooming house in Cambridge.

"There were two Johnson, and they were similar, and I guess the wrong one was given out," said Artis Spears of A.J. Spears Funeral Home, which handled arrangement.

"It is quite sad. This is something that you don't expect to happen and we did the best that we could to rectify it," she said.

This story was compiled with wire dispatches.