From nj.com
| They dropped and mishandled the dead. NJ kept paying them to transport bodies |
It should have taken about 30 minutes, depending on traffic that day.
The body in Passaic was fresh and an investigator with New Jersey’s busiest medical examiner’s office wanted it taken straight to the lab in Newark to figure out how the person died.
The task fell to a company run by a funeral director with a troubled past, Joseph Fantasia.
But it would be a full eight hours until state officials saw the body again. It was stacked with other corpses in an unrefrigerated vehicle, briefly stashed in a county morgue and carted between several death scenes across four counties before it was delivered, according to state records.
One state official described the road trip as “the most egregious treatment of human remains” he’d ever seen by the small group of contractors paid by taxpayers to transport the dead.
The account was one of more than 70 contract violations tallied against Fantasia’s company, which was repeatedly accused of mishandling bodies before it and state officials agreed to end their contract last June, newly uncovered records show.
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