Charles Kong Soo

Un­der­staffed and over­worked, the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre was hard-pressed to au­top­sy more than 30 ca­dav­ers for the day yes­ter­day, lead­ing to a back­log of bod­ies.From 6 am, the cen­tre re­ceived a large num­ber of bod­ies from fu­ner­al homes for res­i­dent pathol­o­gist Dr Valery Alexan­drov and his two at­ten­dants to per­form au­top­sies on.

Up to 5 pm, an hour af­ter the of­fi­cial clos­ing time of the cen­tre, there were still rel­a­tives await­ing con­fir­ma­tion whether their loved ones had been au­top­sied.Too dis­traught to give in­for­ma­tion on the cause of death of their fam­i­ly mem­bers, sev­er­al rel­a­tives said many of them were from the South and made the jour­ney to the cen­tre in St James from as ear­ly as 5 am.

They said one pathol­o­gist could not han­dle that num­ber of bod­ies on his own and the sit­u­a­tion was com­pound­ed by bod­ies hav­ing been pil­ing up since Car­ni­val Fri­day.Wait­ing hearse dri­vers and fu­ner­al home at­ten­dants con­firmed there had been an in­crease in bod­ies over the Car­ni­val pe­ri­od.

The rel­a­tives made an im­pas­sioned plea to the au­thor­i­ties to build an­oth­er foren­sic cen­tre in south Trinidad to ease the bur­den as they lament­ed the lack of space to hold the in­flux of bod­ies at the on­ly foren­sic cen­tre in the coun­try.They said many of the fu­ner­al homes' hears­es parked out­side the Foren­sic Cen­tre still con­tained bod­ies await­ing their turn to be of­floaded and ex­am­ined since the morn­ing, and they were not equipped with re­frig­er­a­tion units.

Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre staff told sev­er­al of the fu­ner­al homes from South that they could not ac­com­mo­date any more bod­ies and they would have to re­turn to­day.