Eight years after his 16-year-old son went missing, a Brooklyn dad discovered that thanks to a medical examiner's "mix-up," his son had been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. The scandal began on June 27, 2003, when 16-year-old Cemal Cansev left his home on Brighton Beach to pick up his report card. He never returned, and father Sahil Cansev filed a missing persons report and began following dead end leads to his son's whereabouts.
A photo of Cemal showed he had a shave mark in his left eyebrow, an signifying membership in the Crips. Sahil said detectives told him they would let him know of any new information, but "they never called." So Sahil spent the next few years following his own leads, including questioning a woman who in 2005 claimed Cemal robbed her in Central Park. However, in February of this year police informed Sahil that Cemal had actually drowned off the 69th St. Pier in Bay Ridge about a week after he went missing. And it took them that long to figure it out because nobody seems to check fingerprints anymore.
A federal grant recently allowed the medical examiner's office to recheck John Doe cases with DNA, so in November the Cansevs submitted DNA samples. Those matched the body found off the pier, which the ME's office had mistakenly identified as the body of a 25-year-old Asian man. And though fingerprints were available from Cemal's passport application, Spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said that they never checked those or dental records because that's the NYPD's job. The NYPD had no comment.
This isn't the first time the medical examiner's office has mistakenly identified a missing person, nor is it the first time they've kept anything from a victim's family. The Cansevs have filed a notice to sue the city. Lawyer James Greenberg said, "City employees failed to access available public records that would have enabled proper identification of the body. As a result of the city's negligence, this family was tortured for eight years instead of eight days."
