Families Tipped Off When They Received The Wrong Personal Effects

The bodies of two men who were killed in when an Evektor-Aerotechnik SportStar Plus went down in Ohio March 5th were mixed up, and the body of the wrong person was cremated.

55-year-old Frank Granato Jr. was the passenger in the airplane when it went down about 75 miles northeast of Dayton, OH. His body was sent to the family of the pilot, 67-year-old Arthur Potter of Greenwood, IN, and cremated. Potter's body was sent to New Castle, IN, where it was mistakenly buried by Granato's family.

The Associated Press reports that the problem was discovered when one of the families reported they had received the wrong personal effects, according to Mongomery County (OH) Coroners office director Ken Betz. Union County coroner Dr. David Applegate, who responded at the scene, said the men could not be positively identified and were sent to Montgomery County for identification through dental records He said the Montgomery County office mislabled the body bags at the crash site.

Betz told the AP that his office identified the men through dental records, but that they did not notice the conflict with the initial ID's made at the scene. "During my tenure at the this office, we have processed over 40,000 bodies, and this is the first time that we have misidentified someone's loved one," Betz said.

The families of the two men declined to comment.

FMI: www.mcohio.org/government/coroner/index.html