NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans Police Department said it did not process fingerprints collected from the body of 42-year-old overdose victim Justin Smith for more than two weeks after an analysis was requested by the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office, blaming an air-conditioning outage at its headquarters for the delay.
The statement, issued Friday afternoon, corrected an earlier NOPD statement issued on Wednesday that said the Coroner’s Office had never requested an analysis of Smith’s fingerprints.
The delays in identifying Smith’s body left his father, Sidney Smith, searching for weeks before learning his son’s body had arrived in the morgue soon after he disappeared and had remained there unidentified, raising new questions about the process for identifying deceased persons in New Orleans.
Justin Smith died of an overdose on June 18, three days after he left the Broadmoor home he shared with his father.
Despite hiring a private detective, filing a missing person report and obtaining a protective custody order aimed at getting Justin Smith treated for mental illness, it took Sidney Smith until July 12 to learn his of son’s death even though his body had undergone an autopsy at the Coroner’s Office on June 19, a day after he was pronounced dead at University Medical Center.
Sidney Smith only learned that Justin Smith’s body was in the morgue after a conversation with his son’s psychiatrist, who had heard that an unidentified body was there fitting Justin Smith’s description. Justin Smith’s body was identified based on photographs Sidney Smith provided the Coroner’s Office.
Coroner Dwight McKenna’s office initially declined to discuss the Smith case specifically, but said it had been “told by NOPD that its fingerprinting device/system was recently down for an extended period of time.” The NOPD’s original statement said the air conditioning problem had interfered with fingerprinting analysis, but added that “the NOPD was not requested to obtain fingerprints in this case.”
After WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune published an article about the case, McKenna’s office provided additional records that showed an NOPD detective collected Smith’s fingerprints on June 25, at the coroner’s request.
“In the process of trying to ID Smith, without the advantage of identification via fingerprints, the family came in with a photograph, which we used to ID their loved one,” McKenna said in the statement, issued Aug. 24, the day after the article ran. “We never stopped the process of trying to ID Justin Smith.”
McKenna did not say what additional steps his office took to identify Smith.
In response to questions, the NOPD on Friday amended its earlier statement to acknowledge McKenna’s request. It said that fingerprint examiners were unable to work from their office at NOPD headquarters – where a fingerprint database is located – because the air conditioning in the building was down.
“Ambient temperatures inside the building often times reached above 90 degrees,” the latest NOPD statement said, adding that running the database in those conditions could have damaged it.
The NOPD said the air conditioning was fixed on July 12, the same day Sidney Smith visited the morgue.
City officials have not said how long the air conditioning was out, but a law enforcement source stationed at headquarters previously said the building had shut down on June 14.
Fingerprints from two other bodies were collected on the same day as Justin, with processing on those two similarly delayed, according to NOPD. It is not clear how many fingerprinting analyses were not conducted as a result of the air conditioning failure.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.
