Silly, Disaster Trophies Are For Museums!

We’ve all seen enough cop shows to know that the cretins who work in the medical examiner’s office are sick fucks:

Two staffers in the city medical examiner’s office were investigated for keeping ghoulish mementos of two disasters, the fatal Staten Island ferry crash and the attack on the World Trade Center, the Daily News has learned.

Both avoided criminal charges after giving back the sorry souvenirs, but now underlings who blew the whistle on them claim they have come in for some callous treatment.

One worker, Robert Yee, a crime scene investigator, kept a grappling hook from the Andrew J. Barberi in his office along with a smiling photo of himself, hook in hand, at the site of the crash that killed 11 people in 2003, authorities said.

The city’s Department of Investigation looked into the matter last year and referred the case back to the medical examiner, said DOI spokeswoman Emily Gest.

“He was appropriately disciplined,” said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.

Borakove said it was a supervisor who spotted the hook in Yee’s office and reported it to higherups.

DOI also probed how a mangled piece of steel from the door of a hijacked plane that crashed into the World Trade Center ended up in the possession of Barbara Butcher, the medical examiner’s investigation director.

Butcher said she received the remnant after the attacks from someone she declined to identify but returned it 24 to 36 hours later when she realized keeping it would be inappropriate, according to Borakove.

But Kenneth Dotson, who has spent 18 years as a crime scene investigator for the medical examiner, says he remembers handing Butcher a bag carrying the item in the weeks after Sept. 11 and that Butcher cheerfully showed it off.

“She said, ‘This is going to look great on a coffee table,'” Dotson told The News.