The city is taking preliminary steps to improve communication between the Police Department and the city Medical Examiner's Office, hoping to reduce time lags in the identification of anonymous bodies brought to the city morgue.
Acting city health commissioner Joanne Godley said that personnel from the Police Department's missing-persons unit and the medical examiner's forensic staff will meet at least once a week to compare notes.

Also, the Health Department plans to develop a new feature on its Web site - www. phila.gov/health/ - describing key physical details and other information about bodies that the Medical Examiner's Office is unable to identify.

Godley said there's been an initial discussion about the police and the M.E.'s office sharing access to an electronic database, to facilitate comparisons between missing persons and unidentified corpses. But no decision on the database has been made, she said.

The efforts follow a recent case in which the body of a 38-year-old North Philadelphia woman went unidentified for more than two years, after being found in an abandoned factory, just four blocks from where she'd been reported missing.

In a second case, a decomposed corpse spent nearly three months in the morgue before a description in the Daily News prompted a friend to call the medical examiner with a likely ID.

Despite his family's repeated calls, the Police Department did not even have the 40-year-old Juniata Park man, Billy Borschell, listed on the missing-persons list it made available to the medical examiner.

In fact, the Police Department's handling of missing-person cases is looking like the biggest part of the problem.

As explained last week by Capt. John Darby, head of the Police Department's special-victims unit, missing-person reports are initially referred to one of the city's five detective divisions. They get referred to his unit only after 30 days, Darby said, and sometimes not even then, if the original detective decides to hold onto the case.

As a result, the Medical Examiner's Office would have to check with six Philadelphia police agencies just to develop a comprehensive list of city residents who have been reported missing.

Godley said that she was sure the Police Department was looking at its missing-person procedures and that she would discuss the situation with Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson. *