The lawsuit comes after a WWL Louisiana investigation with The Times-Picayune this summer, which exposed long delays in identifying bodies at the coroner’s office.
The New Orleans Police Department blames an air-conditioning outage at its headquarters for the delay in processing fingerprints of overdose victim Justin Smith.
The New Orleans Police Department said it did not process fingerprints collected from the body of 42-year-old overdose victim Justin Smith for more than two weeks after an analysis was requested by the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office, blaming an air-conditioning outage at its headquarters for the delay.
When Justin Smith went missing on June 15, his father filed missing person reports, hired a private investigator and frantically scoured his son s usual hangouts in the French Quarter, where