OMI sued after body ‘misplaced’ for 4 months

Family called authorities many times in search for missing man

For months, Victoria Ulibarri held out hope that her missing husband, Lawrence, was alive.

Ulibarri and her children launched a search after the man left home in late October 2016 and never returned.

The agonizing monthslong hunt that followed is the subject of a lawsuit filed April 19 in state District Court.

The Ulibarris called police, local medical facilities, even the Office of the Medical Investigator, but no one knew where he was.

“(Ulibarri) was tremendously relieved to hear that OMI was not in possession of the remains of her husband,” the lawsuit says. “At this point, OMI had given plaintiff reason to believe that her husband was still alive.”

It was not until March 2017, four months after her husband disappeared, that Ulibarri finally learned that the agency had had her husband’s body for months. He had been found dead along a dirt path near Edith Boulevard right around the time that his family noticed he was missing on Oct. 28, 2016.

Police identified him almost immediately after rifling through the contents of his wallet.

OMI retrieved his body, performed an external exam and autopsy, moved his remains to storage, then “misplaced” or “forgot about” them, according to the lawsuit. His body was “left in limbo at OMI’s central office for the next four months, presumably without anyone at OMI noticing a set of unaccounted for and decaying human remains.”

Neither the Albuquerque Police Department nor OMI notified Ulibarri of her husband’s death at that time. And when she called both of those agencies on her own in November, no one provided her with any information on Lawrence’s whereabouts, she alleges.

“It’s an enormously traumatic thing to learn that you’ve been searching in vain for your husband or your father for the past four months when he was dead all along, and people that you had asked about it had misinformed you,” the family’s attorney Levi Monagle said in an interview.

By that point, Lawrence Ulibarri’s remains were so decomposed that they could not be viewed, and the family was informed that the remains would not be released to them, the lawsuit alleges. Instead, they would be released to a mortuary for cremation.

“This slapdash government-mandated cremation process deprived plaintiff of her husband’s remains, and further traumatized plaintiff and her children, who had hoped to give Mr. Ulibarri a proper burial,” the lawsuit alleges.

OMI assured the family that an investigation into the oversight was underway. But in a July letter to the Ulibarris, the office offered no explanation for the failure, only an apology for the way it “handled the family notification process.”

A spokeswoman for the University of New Mexico’s Health Science Center said she could not comment on the lawsuit.

But OMI’s lead investigator in July released a public statement taking responsibility for what he called a “procedural failure.”

Ulibarri alleges that OMI was negligent and is seeking compensation for her damages.

“The family understands that nobody at OMI was out to hurt them, but the nature of the mistake, I think, was so colossal that they think that OMI needs to step up and take responsibility for it in a more meaningful way than just a form apology without any explanation of what went wrong,” Monagle said.