Carole Meikle smiled, leaned over and lightly squeezed the arm of her 86-year-old father, Frank Kerrigan, as they sat in the front row of the spectator’s gallery Tuesday, April 19, inside a small Orange County courtroom.
The moment was nearly five years in the making, capping a three-week trial that lay bare in stunning detail both procedural errors and negligence within the Orange County Coroner’s Office.
Deliberating for just three hours over two days, a jury awarded Kerrigan $1.1 million in damages and Meikle $400,000 after agreeing nearly unanimously with every point of their lawsuit detailing how the Coroner’s Office’s caused them to bury a stranger instead of a family member who turned out to be alive.
“There were so many facts, and so many missteps along the way,” said the elder Kerrigan, a Wildomar resident who was incorrectly told by the Coroner’s Office his son, Frankie, had been found dead behind a Verizon store in Fountain Valley on May 6, 2017. “We just wanted the truth to be known.”
Meikle, believes the Coroner’s Office marginalized her brother, who was 57 at the time, because he was homeless and mentally ill.
“There’s no question that we’re here because of the treatment that he received because of his station in life,” said the 62-year-old Silverado resident.
Attorney Norm Watkins, who represented the county, said he was surprised by the speed of the jury’s verdict, adding the panel was clearly swayed by the plaintiffs’ arguments. Watkins acknowledged the initial misidentification of the body was clearly a mistake, but there was no intention to deceive the plaintiffs. He said the county will review whether to appeal the verdict.
When Meikle learned her brother had died, she rushed to the Verizon store and was directed to a spot near some bushes where Frankie Kerrigan’s body was reported to have been found. It was covered in blood and dirty blankets, leading Meikle to believe her brother’s death was possibly painful and violent.
The elder Kerrigan says he asked the Coroner’s Office if he should identify his son’s body, but was told that was unnecessary because the decedent had already been identified through fingerprints. However, he later learned that wasn’t the case.
When family members received Frankie Kerrigan’s purported belongings from the Coroner’s Office, items seemed to be missing, including a black attache case and a watch he always wore.
At the funeral home, Kerrigan briefly had the casket opened so that he could take a last look at his son. But he was so overcome by grief that he failed to realize it wasn’t Frankie Kerrigan.
The family held an elaborate funeral at Holy Family Catholic Church in Orange and interred the body at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, about 150 feet from the spot where the elder Kerrigan’s late wife, Catherine Kerrigan, is buried.
Then, on May 23 2017, the elder Kerrigan received a telephone call from Bill Shinker, a longtime family friend who had been a pallbearer at Frankie Kerrigan’s funeral. “Frankie is alive,” Shinker told him, explaining that at that moment he was standing on Shinker’s porch.
The Coroner’s Office later publicly apologized, saying the body that had been buried had been identifiedthrough fingerprints as John Dickens, a 54-year-old Kansas native who had died from an enlarged heart and cardiovascular disease.
The mix-up began when a responding Fountain Valley police officer told a Coroner’s Office employee that, based on prior contacts, he believed the person behind the Verizon store was Frankie Kerrigan.
The mistake was further compounded when former Orange County Deputy Coroner David Ralsten obtained Frankie Kerrigan’s 11-year-old driver’s license photo and misidentified him despite obvious differences in weight and facial features between him and the deceased individual.
The Coroner’s Office entered the fingerprints from the dead man into the agency’s LiveScan system, an inkless, digital process used to submit fingerprints electronically to local law enforcement agencies, the California Department of Justice, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations.
Fingerprint results received by the Coroner’s Office contained al six-digit numerical code identifying Dickens as the dead man. However, the numbers went unchecked because personnel had not been adequately trained and were unaware of the significance of the code, Bruce Lyle, a former Orange County assistant chief deputy coroner, testified during the trial.
Kerrigan said the jury’s verdict should send a strong message to Orange County and other coroner’s offices regarding the need for due diligence and proper procedures in identifying the dead.
“This is a wake-up call for the county and every single county out there,” he said. “It can happen to anybody.”
James DeSimone, an attorney who represented Kerrigan and Meikle, described the verdict as vindication and expressed hope the error won’t be repeated by the Coroner’s Office.
“But we still have concerns,” he said. “The concerns are that it is still within their purview for a coroner to identify someone with a match of a photograph. And that’s what is really dangerous here. Because the truth of the matter is, there’s a lot of people who look like each other.”
