A former employee of the state's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner claims she found the remains of a homicide victim whose family had raised money to have their daughter's remains shipped overseas for proper burial.
Regina Banks alleges in a lawsuit she was fired for refusing to take part in "illegal immoral conduct" in an effort to alleviate a backlog of cases.
In a lawsuit filed in Kanawha County Circuit Court Banks says she was ordered to burn human remains and make human remains "disappear" while she worked for about a year as a death investigator for the office. According to the lawsuit, the medical examiner's office has a backlog of cases more than 40 years old.
Another former employee of the medical examiner's office filed suit against the state Department of Health and Human Resources and the medical examiner's office in December with similar allegations. A spokeswoman for the DHHR said Friday that she couldn't comment about the lawsuit.
Banks says she wasn't allowed to speak up about bodies being dropped or mishandled other ways.
She claims when she found the remains of a woman who wasn't supposed to still be in the office, that she wasn't allowed to contact the decedent's family.
"Banks was shocked to learn that the victim's family, either the wrong human remains were shipped overseas to the victim's family, or the remains were never shipped at all and the reports were inaccurate."
Banks does not name the woman but a search online shows that in 2013, the remains of Karen Santillan Tait were shipped to her family in the Philippines from the state medical examiner.
A hiker discovered Tait's badly decomposing body in Greenbrier County in 2002, according to news reports. Tait's husband pleaded guilty to her murder in 2013.
Banks says she asked her supervisors about notifying the family, but was told she was prohibited from doing so, according to her lawsuit. Banks lists her supervisors as Don Raynes, Jim Hanshaw and Dr. Allen Mock.
Banks, who now lives in Texas, says her job duties included serving as a liaison between doctors and law enforcement, working with county medical examiners throughout the state, conducting fingerprinting, DNA sampling, collecting bone samples and reviewing archived cases.
Her lawsuit claims she was also tasked with organizing the cooler where human remains are stored.
"She found the cooler to be in complete disarray," the lawsuit states.
Banks says she came across a fetus that had been stored in the cooler since the 1990s. When she informed her supervisors and recommended the family of the child be contacted for proper burial, Banks alleges her supervisors were concerned that the length of time that had passed would "open a can of worms" if the family was notified.
"In accordance with the general practice of the [office]," the lawsuit alleges, Hanshaw suggested Ms. Banks burn the fetus. Mock then allegedly directed Banks to just "throw" the fetus out as medical waste.
Banks claims she also raised concerns about bodies being dropped and then badly bruised.
Banks became "concerned because doctors who examined the bodies had no way of knowing whether the decedent had been dropped," and, the lawsuit states, "Without this info, law enforcement and prosecutors could incorrectly attribute any bruising resulting from the drops to criminal conduct thus jeopardizing the investigations."
Banks refusal to comply with her supervisors' alleged orders resulted in her being retaliated against, exposed to a hostile work environment and eventually fired, her lawsuit claims.
She was fired last November after taking a medical leave of absence, according to the lawsuit.
Her attorneys, Todd Bailess and Rodney Smith, did not want to comment about the case. Banks' lawsuit is assigned to Kanawha Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit.
Bailess and Smith also represent Regina D. Reynolds, who in December filed a lawsuit claiming she was fired for refusing to take part in a plot to conceal the office's mishandling of human remains.
Reynolds, who worked as an investigator 15 years, alleges she was fired when she refused to burn the human remains she found in a box in the office. The remains were supposed to have been buried in a cemetery.
Reynolds' lawsuit identifies the remains as "D.H."
Deborah Cochran, of Thornton, told the Gazette-Mail earlier this year, that the remains are those of her ex-husband, David Lee Haddix.
Haddix was a Vietnam Army veteran. He died at 61 in 2010 and was identified a year later.
He was buried at the West Virginia National Cemetery in Grafton - or that's what his family thought until Reynolds' lawsuit.
A spokesman from the DHHR previously told the Gazette-Mail that it wasn't the wrong person's remains buried in Grafton, but that possibly not all of the remains had been buried together.
The medical examiner's office had offered Haddix's family to cover the costs of exhumation to place all of the remains together. It wasn't clear last week whether that had happened.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.