Daughter wins suit against coroner over body parts

The coroner now is in private pathology practice in Cincinnati.
CINCINNATI (AP) -- Hamilton County commissioners have approved a $6 million settlement with families who claimed the coroner's office improperly kept organs from bodies that underwent autopsies.
The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed in federal court in 2002 by the daughter of 67-year-old Theodore Singler. The suit claimed the county morgue kept Singler's brain without telling the family.
Singler's body was released for burial in 2000. The morgue kept the brain to try to determine what killed him, according to the autopsy report.
"I thought I was burying my dad and found out I was burying him without a brain," Singler's daughter, Debra Singler of West Chester, said Wednesday following the commission's vote. "That's your personality, everything. My dad's buried without his being, his personality."
Distribution
Singler and four other plaintiffs each will receive $50,000 of the settlement, and a portion of the remainder will pay attorney fees. The rest will be divided among more than 900 people who also have sued, saying organs -- mostly hearts and brains -- were taken without their knowledge from the bodies of family members at the morgue.
The settlement also includes an agreement that the coroner's office must get permission from a person's family before keeping organs and must give the family the option of having the organ returned once a cause of death has been determined.
"If you have to take the brain for legal purposes, to determine the cause of death, just tell us you're doing it," said Singler's attorney, John Metz of Cincinnati. "The county doesn't become the owner of it just because they took it."
The coroner at the time of the lawsuit, Carl Parrott Jr., lost a 2004 bid for re-election and is now in private pathology practice in Cincinnati.
He said the suit led to a change in the definition of an autopsy in Ohio law, which now allows the retention of body parts to diagnose the cause of death.