Homeless Man Buried With Malvinas War Hero Honors Instead of Veteran, Police Sergeant Charged Over Mistake

A homeless man was buried with the military honors reserved for a Malvinas War veteran, while the veteran’s body remained in a morgue. The mistake has prompted a judicial investigation in Moreno and charges against a Buenos Aires provincial police sergeant.

Investigators are examining the role of Ingrid Liliana Gitzel, a sergeant and evisceration technician at the Moreno-General Rodríguez Police Morgue. She allegedly failed to label correctly the bodies of Pedro Manuel Peñalver, a veteran of the war in the South Atlantic, and Adolfo Brizuela.

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Ingrid finished her shift, and the people who replaced her performed an autopsy that we later established had been done incorrectly because they had not removed the clothing, had not fully opened the bag, and performed it on another person's body without paying sufficient attention.

The mix-up came to light only when police went to the former combatant’s family home to tell them that a homicide case had been opened בעקבות findings from an autopsy. The bodies had been cross-identified during the post-mortem process. According to the accusation, Gitzel’s duties included recovering, identifying and labeling bodies and arranging their transfer to the morgue. Prosecutors claim she did not complete those tasks correctly at the locations where the men died, leaving the bodies without proper identification when they arrived.

Gitzel’s defense disputes that account. Her lawyer, Rodrigo Tripolone, said she identified and labeled both bodies correctly, placed them in the cold room and left after completing her shift. He blamed the later forensic examination, saying the forensic specialist intended to begin with the more urgent case, Peñalver’s, but mistakenly took Brizuela’s body. Tripolone told LA NACION that the autopsy was performed without removing the clothing or fully opening the body bag, and on the wrong person. He described the incident as “a chain of errors.”

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If you check the bodies and compare not only what is written on the bag label, but also the morgue register and other elements, there is no way to make a mistake unless you are distracted. And that is where the chain of errors begins, because it is nothing more than a chain of errors.