Preckwinkle has had morgue investigator for a year

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The exterior of the Office of the Medical Examiner at 2121 W. harrison street. | Al Podgorski

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Updated: March 7, 2012 9:47AM

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle recently dispatched senior staff to the troubled medical examiner’s office to straighten up the place amid reports of bodies stacking up and employees complaining about unhealthy working conditions.

Yet, for the last year an investigator directly under her authority has been checking in on the morgue regularly, the Sun-Times has learned.

Carmine Ruffolo was assigned to check on the Stein Institute, 2121 W. Harrison, and other county offices under Preckwinkle’s authority, to keep an eye on timecards and employees’ comings and goings all over the building, according to sources and Preckwinkle’s office.

Asked whether Ruffolo was informed of overcrowding complaints — before frustrated staffers went to the media with their stories and photos — Preckwinkle spokeswoman Liane Jackson said in a recent interview: “He doesn’t check the cooler.”

She was referring to the body storage cooler, which has a capacity of about 300, though, staffers said, held closer to twice that number of corpses in early January.

Sources inside the medical examiner’s office say over at least the last year, they have spotted Ruffolo weekly, coming and going at all hours, checking on evening and overnight shift workers. He had full and free access to the entire building, they said, though he parked his things in an office in the investigations department, they said. And he spent time in every department, they said.

Preckwinkle herself was not aware of this particular investigator.

“I don’t know who Carmine Ruffolo is,” she told the Sun-Times in a recent interview.

Still, she knows his duties are tracking “time and attendance” at the morgue, among other duties. Preckwinkle said “no” when asked whether the investigator had at least heard staff complaining about overcrowding at the morgue.

And she would not expect him to.

“The person who was there was looking at time and attendance issues,” Preckwinkle said. “That’s a different level of inquiry then what we’re doing now.”

At a Jan. 20 press conference, days after a Sun-Times report detailing the problems, Preckwinkle made a point of announcing she had just dispatched senior staff to keep an eye on the morgue. The staff are from the Bureau of Administration, the same department Ruffolo works in.

“In the course of the last year, we’ve had a series of issues at the medical examiner’s office,” Preckwinkle said at the time. “This week I detailed senior members of the bureau of administration to be present in the medical examiner’s office every day going forward to see if we can address some of the issues there.”

A week later, Preckwinkle held another press conference at the morgue to announce an “overhaul” and that staff would likely be fired over the mess.

Morgue employees told the Sun-Times in mid-January that bodies were being stacked atop each other in blue, plastic tarps against a wall of the storage cooler. One source said that while roughly 300 is the capacity for the cooler — just under 400 adults and about 100 babies and fetuses were in the cooler. Another called the situation “sacrilegious” and said that bodily fluids pooling in the cooler posed a health hazard to staff.