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| MSF040612 June 12 2004; Clarksdale | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 4 2008, 12:10 PM (282 Views) | |
| PorchlightUSA | May 4 2008, 12:10 PM Post #1 |
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http://www.picayuneitem.com/local/local_story_086112708.html Published: March 26, 2008 11:27 am Woman wants truth after body in grave turns out not be her daughter Associated Press Clarksdale — When Willie Mae Galmore buried her daughter in 2004, she was left with a sinking feeling that the person in the casket was not her child. DNA testing has confirmed her suspicions and now she’s on a mission to find out what happened. Authorities reported in June 2004 that Galmore’s daughter, Rochelle Thomas, died in a car accident. She was buried in Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Lyon after a closed casket funeral. In August 2007, the body was exhumed at Galmore’s request and DNA proved the woman was not Galmore’s child. Even more disturbing, the body is likely that of an unidentified male. While authorities in Warren County were notified following the test results in September 2007, they have reportedly not retrieved the incorrectly identified body or concluded what became of Thomas following the accident. “They told me that by Feb. 1 they would tell me what is going on with this,” Galmore said. “I still haven’t heard a thing from them.” Coahoma County Coroner Scotty Meredith assisted Galmore in obtaining a DNA sample on the body in her daughter’s grave. He doesn’t understand why officials are so unresponsive. “DNA does not lie. According to the test results there is no way that body is her daughter,” Meredith said. “We called the Attorney General’s office about the matter and within an hour heard from the Vicksburg Police Department. They told us that we would hear from them by Feb. 1 and nothing has been done yet.” Thomas, who was a 34-year-old mother of three at the time of the accident, was reportedly found dead on June 12, 2004, beside her wrecked car in a ravine in Vicksburg. When her mother asked then-Warren County Coroner John Thomason if she could come identify the body, she was allegedly told no due to the state of decomposition. Thomason then told Galmore that he identified the body as belonging to Thomas and sent the body to Mississippi Mortuary Services to undergo an autopsy by Dr. Steven Hayne. “Don’t come down here is what they told me,” Galmore said. Galmore buried the body as her daughter June 21, 2004, but even with assurances that the body recovered from the wreck was her daughter, Galmore still had doubts, She requested to see pictures of Thomas’ body. Thomason wrote a letter to Galmore on Dec. 21, 2004, saying: “As far as your request for pictures, as I told you numerous times before I do not have any pictures. At autopsy, the pathologist takes pictures of the deceased. I do not have any of those pictures. As far as I know the Vicksburg Police do not have any pictures.” Nearly a year after Thomas’ funeral, Thomason himself was killed in a car accident. After the deputy coroner took over the office, Galmore obtained pictures of the body identified as recovered from the car wreck. She said the physical characteristics of the body in the pictures only further confirmed her belief that it was not her daughter. “You couldn’t see a face in the pictures, but the body just looked too big to be Rochelle. It looked like a man’s body,” she said. Meredith says there are a number of possible scenarios for the mixup. One possibility, he said, is that there were two people in Thomas’ car and her body was thrown so far from the wreck it was never found. Or, he said, the bodies could have been switched at some point in the process between the wreck and autopsy and funeral, and Thomas is buried in someone else’s grave. Meredith doubts Thomas is still alive because she has not come back for her children. Galmore, who has been raising her grandchildren since 2004 in Memphis, says she has no closure. “I am carrying this all alone. If I can even sleep three hours I am up and at ’em. It’s beginning to wear me down, but I can’t give up now,” she said. |
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| PorchlightUSA | May 4 2008, 12:11 PM Post #2 |
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http://www.pressregister.com/articles/2008...f0637259793.txt Body mix up gets more confusing By ANDY ROSS, Staff Writer Friday, May 2, 2008 10:54 AM CDT The Coahoma County Board of Supervisors recently gave authorization to County Coroner Scotty Meredith to exhume a gravesite in Lyon allegedly containing the wrong body, and rebury the corpse in a nearby paupers grave. The gravesite in Heavenly Rest Cemetery is marked as containing Rochelle Thomas, a woman who was reported to have been killed in a 2004 traffic accident in Vicksburg. Last summer, the grave was exhumed for DNA testing at the request of Thomas’s mother, Willie Mae Galmore, and revealed Galmore and the body in Thomas’s grave are unrelated. The DNA tests also revealed the body contained more male chromosomes than female chromosomes although that reportedly does not necessarily determine the sex as being male. Ever since Thomas’s death in June 2004, Galmore claimed she buried the wrong person as her daughter. Her claims were based on pictures she acquired of the body from the crashsite, and the fact she allegedly was not allowed to identify the body before the closed casket funeral based on the state of decomposition. Galmore says she had to struggle with officials to even acquire pictures, and once she did, the few recognizable features in them resembled a man’s body and not that of her daughter. The issue being brought before the board of supervisors last week is the latest development in the strange and still unresolved case. Numerous discrepancies surrounding identification procedures following the accident, and the fact then Warren County Coroner John Thomason has since died, make the case especially difficult to decipher. What is known is that Thomas’ vehicle was found crashed in a ditch off Warrington Road in Vicksburg on June 12, 2004. The body retrieved from the scene was identified by Thomason as being Rochelle Thomas, and sent to Mississippi Mortuary Services for autopsy by Dr. Stephen Hayne. Yet while Thomason positively identified the body as Thomas and signed off on the death certificate, he still reportedly tagged her as a Jane Doe, or unknown, before sending the body to Mississippi Mortuary. Further, both provisional and final autopsy reports list Thomas height as being 5 feet 7 inches when by all accounts from family she was six feet tall. Meredith has said he cannot understand why Thomason would identify the body if there were any questions of its true identity. The fact that he did positively identify Thomas and then tagged her as a Jane Doe also makes no sense, he says. “I have been doing this 20 years and I don’t identify bodies myself unless I am absolutely sure, and if I can’t identify a body then I go by dental records,” Meredith said. Galmore says that on the night her daughter’s car and alleged body were discovered, she was told by Thomason not to come identify her based on the extensive state of decomposition. Galmore says she was told there really was no face left to recognize. “Don’t come down here is what they told me,” Galmore said. Vicksburg Police Chief Tommy Moffett worked the scene of the accident that night. He says he saw the body, and although there was decomposition taking place, it was not to such a degree that identification would be impossible. He declined to speculate on why Thomason would have told Galmore not to come and identify her daughter. Moffett claims the body Vicksburg officials sent to Mississippi Mortuary was the same body retrieved from the crashsite that night. “The body at Mississippi Mortuary is the same body we turned over, and it was a female body,” he said. Moffett also says he has pictures of Thomas from the autopsy table showing her face and gold teeth. He says he sent copies of those pictures to Galmore twice in 2004 and that her features would have been recognizable to someone who knew her closely. “If I had known Rochelle Thomas, I could have identified her from those pictures,” Moffett said. Galmore acknowledges her daughter had gold teeth but says she never received any pictures showing her daughter’s face or such specific features. “I didn’t see any gold teeth in the pictures I got. You couldn’t even see the nose or teeth or anything,” Galmore said. Linda Jones, Thomas’ sister, who has also been sharing information with her mother about the case, says she never saw or heard of any pictures showing recognizable features. “If my mother had seen pictures showing a face and gold teeth, I would have known about it,” she said. Meredith says one possible scenario could have involved bodies somehow becoming switched in the morgue during the time of autopsy. But Meredith says he has inquired with Mississippi Mortuary whether there was more than one body suffering decomposition that night in 2004 and was told no. No matter what details of the case remain unclear in relation to where and how a mixup occurred, what is known is that the body buried in Heavenly Rest Cemetery is unrelated to Galmore. “DNA does not lie,” Meredith said. “According to the test results, there is no way that body is her daughter.” Meredith says he is in the process of communicating with officials in Warren County and Galmore to determine the details surrounding plans for exhuming Thomas’ gravesite and burying it in a paupers grave. |
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| PorchlightUSA | May 4 2008, 12:12 PM Post #3 |
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