TWO RECENT instances of long delays in identifying bodies at the medical examiner's office were mostly the result of biology, city officials say - advanced decomposition, sometimes so bad that investigators had trouble determining a corpse's age, race or even sex.
Nevertheless, officials agreed yesterday, the cases point to a need for better use of new technology and better communication - with the public and between the two city agencies that deal with dead bodies, the Police Department and the M.E.'s office.

"I know how difficult it can be for families not to know what happened to a loved one," said City Medical Examiner Haresh G. Mirchandani. In spite of personnel cutbacks, Mirchandani told a City Council hearing, his investigators have identified all but three or four of the 3,000 bodies that are brought to the office each year.

"That number three is still too many for me," Mirchandani said.

Councilman Juan Ramos set up the hearing after two recent cases pointed to problems in the city's handling of missing persons and unidentified remains.

In mid-November, a decomposed body that had been kept frozen in the city morgue for more than two years was identified as that of Unisha "Niecey" Jefferson, a 38-year-old North Philadelphia woman who had disappeared in April 2003.

Her body was found in September 2003, in an abandoned factory on Marjie Street, just four blocks from where she was last seen. But when her family called the medical examiner, they were never told about the unidentified corpse.

"We kept calling the morgue," Jefferson's sister Katrina John-son testified yesterday. "They told me over and over, 'We don't have any unclaimed bodies. ' "

In early December, the Daily News ran descriptions of a dozen other unidentified bodies discovered over the past four years.

The publicity led to the immediate identification of a Juniata Park man, Billy Borschell, who had disappeared last August. His badly-decomposed body, wasted away to just 71 pounds, was found in September, six blocks from the rowhouse where he had lived with his mother. But the police had never put Borschell on the missing-persons list it shared with the medical examiner.

Mirchandani said his office has set up regular weekly meetings with the police missing-persons unit to exchange information and put descriptions of unidentified remains on the Health Department's Web site, www.phila.gov/ health, and a private site, www. pennsylvaniamissing.com.

Specimen samples from unidentified remains will undergo DNA analysis and will be added to a national DNA database established by the FBI, Mirchandani said.

Police Chief Inspector Joseph Fox said the police also would help collect DNA samples from relatives of missing persons, for use in the same national database. He said relatives interested in participating should contact the detectives assigned to their missing-persons cases. Family members at yesterday's hearing remained skeptical about the city's promises.

Katrina Johnson said she initially lied to police - telling them her sister was suicidal - to convince them to take a missing-persons report.

Johnson said she believed that her sister had been killed, her body dumped on the fourth floor of a warehouse wearing only underwear and socks.

"Where are the rest of her clothes?" asked her mother, Evelyn Bookhart. The medical examiner has attributed Jefferson's death to a drug overdose, and the police are not investigating it as a murder. Still, Johnson said. "I don't buy it. "

Orlanda Smith, a manager in the Clerk of Quarter Sessions office, happened to be driving by when Jefferson's body was found in 2003. She said she had been concerned enough to follow up with the medical examiner's office, and was unhappy with the investigator's response.

"He stated that he could drive down that street and pick up five or six bodies," Smith testified. "He said people go into these warehouses to use drugs. He stated that he was present at the dirty, nasty, stinky, smelly warehouse . . . and basically I should not concern myself with this. I tried to put this behind me, I could not. "

Another witness, Alison Mosley, complained that after her estranged brother died in his Spring Garden Street apartment - apparently of natural causes - in March 2003, authorities never notified his family.

They found out themselves about six months later, Mosley said, when the brother's phone service was shut off. They went to his apartment, long since cleaned out, learned of the brother's death and contacted the M.E.'s office to learn that the body was still there - officially listed as a 65-year-old black male, when in fact he was a 50-year-old Caucasian.

"A dead body is not a missing piece of luggage," Mosley said.

"There are people around who care. . . . The whole process [of dealing with corpses] seems to be disjointed and cavalier." *