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Cash in envelope on body in morgue at TMH stolen
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
A Warren police official says he believes ValleyCare Trumbull Memorial Hospital has addressed a flaw that enabled someone to steal $150 from an envelope on a body in the Trumbull County morgue Friday.
The morgue is in the hospital.
Capt. Rob Massucci said he assigned his evidence technician, Eric Laprocina, to look into the matter. Laprocina collected evidence, but the department won’t be assigning a detective unless the hospital asks for assistance, he said.
It appears this is an internal matter within the hospital, Massucci said.
“They’ve shored it up after this incident. I think they will handle this internally,” Massucci said.
Trish Hrina, ValleyCare’s vice president of marking and public relations, issued this statement Tuesday night: “It is our policy to report incidents to the appropriate agency, in this case police and/or the coroner’s office. However, it is our practice not to provide additional comment on matters under investigation.”
Kathy Meszaros, a coroner’s investigator, reported to police on Monday a theft occurred sometime between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Friday.
A bag containing a deceased person’s property was stapled shut and placed on the body, the police report said. At some point, personnel realized the money was missing from the envelope.
“It appeared the bag had been opened and then stapled again,” the patrolman responding to the complaint wrote in a report.
Massucci said the office was locked, and there was no sign of forced entry. The hospital told the police department as many as 30 people could have had access to the morgue.
Massucci said two procedural issues may have contributed to the incident: Property is normally placed in a separate location from the bodies, and that location used to be monitored with video equipment.
Some of those procedures changed recently, however, so there is no video showing the theft, Massucci said.
He added he doesn’t know why the money was on the body instead of in a separate property location, but hospital officials said they had corrected the problem.
There was a previous theft in the morgue sometime in the past couple of years, Massucci said, but it involved a purse theft from an employee and didn’t involve any bodies.
A call seeking comment from Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk, county coroner, was not returned Tuesday. A Vindicator request to Dr. Germaniuk to see the morgue to better understand how it operates was denied.