Thanks for the link, @Kayak8.
I fault nearly everyone in this travesty.
The Medical Examiner doesn’t need to wait “months” to “accumulate enough brains” to call for a travelling analyst. If it’s important to do the analysis at all—and if they’re waiting “months”, then I can hardly see how they justify its importance—then they can have a low-cost employee drive the brain to the analyst’s lab, and then drive back to pick it up again later. That preserves custody-of-evidence if the results are ever required in a court case, and preserves the dignity of the deceased while saving money as much as practical. (Not “as much as possible”, because there’s also UPS and FedEx, but that’s not “practical”.)
I fault the kids on the field trip, who went apeshit when they saw brains in a jar. (I loved @Seek_Kolinahr‘s rejoinder.) And worse, that they felt the need to tell the victim’s sister and get her all upset.
I fault the family of the victim for acting in such high dudgeon, outrage and hysteria (as evidenced by the sister’s collapse at the news, and exacerbated by their later actions).
I fault the teacher who thought that a field trip to a morgue would be a good idea, especially within a couple of months of a classmate’s violent death. The trip itself isn’t a bad idea, but they could have waited a bit longer.
I fault the morgue for having identifiable remains of anyone in a place where they are visible to the public. For Christ’s sake, even supermarket stockboys are familiar with bar-coding technology these days—can’t anyone use a bar-code printer, scanner and database on such sensitive materials? Or keep them away from all members of “the general public”?
And last, and probably least, the fucking priest who considers it “not a proper burial” that has to be redone. Fuck him. I hope his body ends up in a thousand pieces after his death.
Does anyone have any sense any more?