7 News Belize

Western Regional Mixes Up Still-Born And Fetus
posted (June 24, 2013)
Tonight a Belmopan family is still recovering from the pain of a still born baby coupled with a massive mix-up by the Western Regional Hospital. An expecting mother – whose name the family has asked us not to release – went in to the Hospital on Tuesday evening with labour pains. The doctor's told her it was not time yet for her to deliver and they sent her home. But by late Tuesday night she was in distress – and when they checked for a pulse, her baby had no pulse. They scheduled an emergency surgery which took three hours to happen because medical personnel were not readily available.

And so after enduring that agonizing loss, the family planned a burial for Saturday – except when they went to get the body out of the morgue – it wasn't there; it had been given to another family, one that had a miscarriage.

After much back and forth, the family tracked down their baby's body to a shallow grave in Camalote. With the District Medical Officer and Police on hand, they exhumed the body yesterday morning at 6:30 – where it still had on the proper name tag on the toe.

They immediately transferred the tiny corpse to their casket and held a small burial ceremony in Belmopan. It is tragedy compounded by administrative incompetence, and yesterday the baby's grandfather told Monica Bodden, they are outraged:

Orlando Muschamp - Grandfather of Baby
"The baby was marked/labeled 'Agnelie Guy' on the sheet that we had bought for the baby, the new born and it as handed over to the nurse and the nurse wanted to show my little daughter and my wife and the husband Mr. Mark Guy and they took it to the morgue. We proceeded with our funeral arrangements for Saturday so we made the child a nice coffin, we made a tomb for him and we had made arrangements to do the funeral for 1:00 on Saturday - having knowing that my daughter would have been recuperated already, three days so she could have been to the funeral at least to the service. Well what happened? On Saturday morning I went to the morgue along with the box to pick up the baby, I called the morgue attendant and he said he was going to meet me there. He did meet me there and when he did so, he told me 'there's no baby' which I had already known because I had seen that the morgue was dilapidated - no doors on it, totally unhinged, broken up, freezers disconnected and cats in the morgue. So I was discouraged and he said there wasn't any baby in there and so we went to speak to the male attendant, the one that was working that day. When I went to him he said he gave away a baby on Thursday and I asked him who he gave the baby to and he told me to the family, to the lady that had the baby. So we sat down, no closure for us and no funeral because there was no body."

Monica Bodden
"And were people waiting at the church?"

Orlando Muschamp
"People were waiting at the church because we were going to do a viewing of the body from 11-1 o'clock and from there we would have had the funeral at 1. All the food and preparations, the coffin and everything were ready for a funeral and absolutely no body. They located the mother and I asked who it was, they should be going through the same thing we are going through knowing that they have had a funeral with a baby that isn't theirs. But first of all how could they have given the body to a mother who had a fetus and our baby was a full born baby? It's impossible.

Anyway we went to the cemetery in Camalote where we saw a grave and they told us that it was the grave. So we wanted to exhume the body because we had agreed to leave the body there if it was done properly, whereby it was in a nice tomb and we would have known the location and we would have had closure, it was a mistake but at least we know where the baby was - but as a contractor and a person who deals with soil, from the moment I saw the soil, I knew that the baby was only 6 or 7 inches below. It took us about 15 minutes to do it because it was only 6 - 7 inches of soil on top of the tomb, no name and no wreath - just like if it was a dog or a cat that was laid to rest there."

Monica Bodden
"Now at this point - you guys met the family that they supposedly gave away the body to?"

Orlando Muschamp
"Of course not, they don't want us to know that but we have names that they said they gave the body to. We are investigating that, I am quite sure that this story could not be true, I cannot imagine seeing a mother - a new born baby into a tomb of that sort that didn't even meet the standards of public health."

We are told that the Camalote family did later get their baby body - – which was at a fetal stage - from the Western Regional Morgue.

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