By Sindya N. Bhanoo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

It wasn't until one of her neighbors offered condolences that Yasmin Leftwich found out that her brother was dead. By then, his body had been at the D.C. medical examiner's office for three days, unclaimed.

Marvin Leftwich Jr., 53, was found dead inside his Northwest Washington apartment late May 27 by a maintenance worker who went there to investigate why water was leaking from the unit. The police were called immediately, and his body was taken to the morgue -- but the family got no calls from the police, the D.C. medical examiner's office or the D.C. Housing Authority, which oversees the building.

Authorities had no trouble identifying the body, and word of Leftwich's death, of an apparent heart attack, had circulated throughout the Garfield Terrace apartment building on 11th Street NW. Yasmin Leftwich, who lives in Northeast, said that her neighbor heard about it from one of the building's employees.

"My brother was dead for three days, and I had to find out on the street?" she asked.

The case marked the second time in recent months that the city has failed to inform families of loved ones' deaths. In April, the body of Jeremy Miller, a 35-year-old computer technician from Spotsylvania, lay unclaimed at the D.C. medical examiner's office for two days after he suffered a fatal seizure on a Northeast Washington street. His parents, who live in Fredericksburg, learned of his death when contacted by a Washington Post reporter.

The Leftwich family is at a loss as to why the building's management did not notify them, said Yasmin Leftwich, 43. "My brother had a folder of emergency contact information, including my number and my brother's number," she said.

In an interview, Dena Michaelson, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Housing Authority, apologized for what happened and said that it also was inappropriate for the building employee to have talked about a private family matter.

Typically, the building's management would have contacted the family, Michaelson said. "But because the police was there, we left it to them. Evidently we did not contact the next of kin," she said.

"To tell you the truth, whether it was the manager or the police department who should have informed the family, the end result was that the family was aggrieved, and we're sorry for that," Michaelson said. "We will follow through to make sure this doesn't happen again."

The medical examiner's office relies on D.C. police to make all notifications, officials said.

D.C. police Inspector Rodney Parks said that, in Leftwich's case, the family phone number the police had from the housing authority was an old one. Police were planning to make the notification, he said, but the process takes time, and family members learned on their own.

"If anyone had the correct information in my office, they would have informed the family," he said.

Yasmin Leftwich said that with today's technology, the job should not be that difficult.

Marvin Leftwich Jr., a D.C. native, was retired on disability from the D.C. Department of Public Works, where he worked as a maintenance engineer. He resided in Garfield Terrace for one year.

"The biggest issue for us is that we had to hear this from a neighbor," his sister said. "Clearly, there was some lack of communication on all parts."