Morgue loses woman's body

CHICAGO, June 19 (UPI) -- Relatives of a Chicago woman whose body was lost by the city morgue said they may have to delay her funeral.

"This is absurd," Rosemary Fogell, cousin of Rosalie Schlutz, told the Chicago Sun-Times. "How can they lose a body?"

The morgue at the Cook County, Ill., medical examiner's office couldn't find Schultz's remains to give to a funeral director on Monday. Officials there speculated the 64-year-old woman's remains were sent to the wrong funeral home, the Sun-Times reported.

"I feel awful," Dr. Scott Denton, interim chief medical examiner, told the newspaper. "I feel bad. It is horrible. I wouldn't want this to happen to me and my family. It is just really unfortunate."

It was the second time in two years the morgue misplaced a body, the Sun-Times said.

Schultz was found dead in her home last Thursday of heart stress and hypertensive cardiovascular disease in what the newspaper said was Cook County's first heat-related death of the year.