Chicago police officers were relieved of one of their most grisly responsibilities 25 years ago: hauling dead bodies to the medical examiner’s office.
Cook County initially took over the job, then handed it off to a series of private companies with mixed results — and a few scandals along the way.
Now, the city’s decision to award a five-year, nearly $4.5 million contract for body removal to a single Northwest Side funeral home is raising questions. One police supervisor wondered whether “a funeral home is equipped to handle the city’s volume.”
Wallace Harrison Funeral Home was the lowest of three bids for the lucrative contract.
The highest bid was submitted by Chicago-based Allied Services Group, the incumbent contractor that has been paid more than $16 million since 2011.
In the latest round of competition, Allied bid $10.56 million for the body transport business, more than double the winner’s price. The third bid — for nearly $7.4 million — was submitted by First Call Mortuary of Frankfort.
Nakia Wallace-Harrison, president of the funeral home that won the contract, said she is confident that her funeral home can handle body removal for the whole city — even if there is a mass casualty incident, another pandemic or a repeat of the 1995 heat wave that killed more than 500 Chicagoans, most of them older adults.
“If there was a mass casualty — if somebody ran up in your house and you’ve got a family of eight and everybody died — would we be able to come and take out all of the people who died? And then, there’s another one that happens all the way on 105th in Chicago, another mass fatality, would we be able to get over there and take care of that at the same time, maybe 15 minutes later? Yes, we will,” Wallace-Harrison said. “If all the bodies dropped because the temperatures rose, and then we got the fentanyl overdoses on the other side of town? Yes, we will be there to remove those bodies.”
Wallace-Harrison told the Chicago Sun-Times that she has 20 transport vehicles and 20 employees. But the affidavit she filed with the city last fall indicates that her funeral home has just five full-time employees, including herself.
The affidavit lists only one employee by name: Nakia Wallace-Harrison. A second manager is listed but not identified. The three remaining employees are listed as “TBD.”
Current and former Chicago police officers question whether a single funeral home has the capacity to handle the citywide business.
Ald. Anthony Napolitano (41st), who has served the city as both a police officer and a firefighter, said he doesn’t “know if it’s possible.”
“You’re on the Northwest Side. What about when you’re reporting to 117th and Stony [Island] or Jeffery? How do you do that in traffic in the city of Chicago, as far as time constraints for that removal? I just don’t know how that’s possible,” said Napolitano, whose Far Northwest Side ward is home to scores of Chicago police officers.
The new contract includes a penalty for delayed transport of bodies. If the contractor fails to arrive at the scene within 75 minutes of the initial call-out by 911 dispatchers, the fee of $172 per body will be cut in half.
If transport is delayed to the point where Chicago police officers are forced to do the job of body removal, then the funeral home must reimburse the city for the cost of transport. That provision is the result of a police union grievance.
Napolitano was an officer when the Chicago Police Department was saddled with responsibility for body removal.
“In some summers — especially when you got some really bad, tainted drugs out there — it was nonstop transporting. So I don’t know how one place can do this,” Napolitano said. “We weren’t given the proper equipment to do it, either. In some bad cases, where you got a decomposed body, back then we didn’t have the proper suits to wear. You just put some gloves on, put cigarette butts in your nose or some Vicks VapoRub, and go in there and do it. It was brutal.”
Over the years, dead body removal has been a source of controversy.
In 2005, two grieving Chicago families were devastated by a mix-up that sent the wrong bodies to their respective funeral homes. The mistake was not discovered until one of the dead women had been buried.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office and the body removal contractor at the time — Ohio-based GSSP Enterprise Inc. — blamed each other for the mistake. Lawsuits filed by the two families were ultimately settled out of court.
GSSP President Brian Higgins, who was at center of the Chicago controversy, was sent to prison in 2022 after being convicted of mail fraud and witness tampering in connection to a federal corruption probe in Ohio.
At one point, GSSP was charging Chicago $915 per body, the largest removal fee paid by any big city in the nation. Wallace Harrison Funeral Home will charge the city $172 per body.