Homicide victims buried without autopsy

Oct 22,2007 00:00 by UPI

CHICAGO -- Many Chicago homicide victims are inadvertently buried without autopsies, authorities say.

Such burials happen "all the time," Cook County Chief Medical Examiner Nancy Jones told The Chicago Sun-Times Sunday.

Andrew Cook, for example, died Aug. 21 -- seven weeks after he was beaten, stabbed and left on a Chicago sidewalk. Although the attack was still being investigated when Cook died, his body was not examined before he was buried, the Sun-Times said.

The error forced his family to endure the process of exhuming his body and then burying him again.

In Cook’s case, a doctor’s instructions caused the mistake. After Cook died at the nursing home where he was forced to spend the last few weeks of his life, a doctor listed "coronary disease" as the cause of death on the death certificate and also checked the "no autopsy" box, the newspaper said.