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.

Jamaica Bay Is No Place For A Lost Pup

I know baggage handlers at JFK like to steal shit, but this is out of control:

An award-winning pooch from the Westminster Kennel Club show bolted from her travel cage yesterday as she was being loaded onto a California-bound plane — and vanished into the marshes around Kennedy Airport.

Vivi, a 3-year-old brown-and-white whippet that canine connoisseurs say could be worth more than $50,000, was still a stray as of last night, despite a day-long search by Port Authority police in SUVs, a helicopter and a boat.

Distraught owner Jil Walton, 39, said she feared for Vivi’s life.

“When it’s cold she’s not happy,” Walton said. “She’s a skinny little thing and I don’t know if she’ll make it. That’s what’s killing me.”

“God,” she said ruefully, “I want this dog back.”

Walton said she’d “consider” a reward for Vivi’s return, but didn’t name a figure.

Damn Jumpers

The Post reports:

A man jumped in front of an oncoming subway train and survived yesterday, but was so bent on killing himself that he electrocuted himself on the third rail, police said.

Why would you do that?

Not Just Lice — Super-Duper Lice

First bedbugs, now lice:

Have we entered a new age of hard-to-eradicate super-lice? Some nit-picking pros think so. Adie Horowitz, president of Licenders, a local purveyor of treatment kits and services, says she’s seen a 20 percent bump in patients this school year.

Others in the same line of work also report an uptick in business. Abigail Rosenfeld, a Brooklyn delouser with eighteen years’ experience, says she’s never been so busy — not only with more clients than usual, but more crawlies per kid.

We Hear Arizona Is Nice This Time Of Year

A “confused” Upper East Side woman who was unsure what to do with a dead body seems to have wanted to ship her dead husband’s body to Arizona via parcel post. The smell led police to her apartment:

The smell of death led cops yesterday to a ritzy upper East Side building, where a confused 67-year-old woman told them she stuffed her husband’s corpse in a suitcase to ship him to Arizona, police sources said.

“He always wanted to go to Arizona,” Carole Fallon told cops who arrived at her cluttered 11th-floor apartment in the Plaza Tower on E. 60th St., where she lives with her 97-year-old mother, the sources said.

When asked about a foul odor, the women pointed to a suitcase packed with the rotting body of 87-year-old James Fallon, who died about two weeks ago, sources said.

Fallon, who suffered from a heart condition and high blood pressure, used a cane to get around and was in ailing health in recent months, neighbors said.

“I think they were confused,” said William Fallon of Arizona, whose father married his stepmother 30 years ago. “It’s not the way I pictured my father.”

Police believe Fallon, a retired Los Angeles land developer, died of natural causes and the women panicked, cops said.

Carole Fallon and her mom, who both suffer from medical conditions, didn’t appear to believe they did anything wrong, law enforcement sources said.

“They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know who to call,” a police source told the Daily News. “They figured they could call the post office and they could come and pick it up.”

. . .

Fallon and her mother, who don’t have any relatives in the immediate area, were taken to Bellevue Hospital to be looked after, sources said.

Cops hauled two pricey Louis Vuitton bags out of the 34-story building but it was not immediately clear if they had been used in the bizarre body storage.

The Plaza Tower was once home to famed Broadway performer Ethel Merman.