HMS Prof Named Medical Examiner

A case of corporeal confusion in the form of mistaken burial has elevated a Harvard professor to direct the state medical examiner’s office for Massachusetts.

Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78 announced late last week that Frederick R. Bieber, an assistant professor of pathology at the Harvard Medical School, will become interim director of the state medical examiner’s office after the office admitted to discharging the wrong body for a burial last month.

The examiner’s office noticed the body of Thomas E. Brissette had gone missing on April 25, but state police were not notified until over a week later. Police officers unearthed the body from a Massachusetts cemetery on Saturday, The Boston Globe reported.

The mix-up is the latest in a string of errors—including sending the wrong set of eyeballs to a lab for testing and incorrectly identifying a victim’s body—that have plagued the office in recent years.

Bieber said he was asked to take on the post of interim chief executive officer on Friday afternoon by the office of the secretary of public safety but that he only expects to stay for a matter of “days or weeks.”

“I’m really a full-time academic, and in the spirit of public service, I thought it was important to answer the call from the Governor’s office,” he said. “But I really couldn’t stay long-term.”

Though he has not yet investigated the incident and emphasized listening to the office’s staff in evaluating the current succession system, he did express concern about medical examiner’s offices across the country getting short shrift.

“Many medical examiner offices around the country are understaffed and faced fiscal challenges of trying to do their work with limited budgets,” Bieber said. “Many of these problems are not unique to Massachusetts.”

The chief medical examiner, Mark A. Flomenbaum, was placed on paid leave pending an investigation into the recent misidentification, according to a statement by the Executive Office of Public Safety that was reported in The Globe.

The Patrick administration has stated it will fire Flomenbaum if an investigation confirms that the mix-up occurred.

Then-Governor W. Mitt Romney appointed Flomenbaum—who previously served in the New York City medical examiner’s office—after the Massachusetts office was rocked by state and federal investigations.

Not long after he assumed the post, Flomenbaum told The Globe that he saw a “formula for disaster” in the way the system operated at the time.

“When you put the whole thing together, the enormity of the situation was more than what any individual expected,” he said.

If he is dismissed, Flomenbaum would become the second director of an Executive Office of Public Safety agency to leave after accusations of mismanagement in the past few months. Carl Selavka, the former head of the Massachusetts State Police crime laboratory, resigned this March after allegations of DNA test mix-ups.

—Staff writer Clifford M. Marks can be reached at cmarks@fas.harvard.edu.