On Tuesday morning, three mothers gathered on Chicago’s Near West Side, seeking justice and accountability from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office (CCMEO), alleging a pattern of delays in identifying their sons. One son was confirmed to have died from a heart condition, while the causes of death for the others remain undetermined.
In each case, they said, the CCMEO’s lack of follow-up and lack of follow-through resulted in their loved ones’ bodies remaining unclaimed in the morgue for weeks.
Their sons were Malcolm McFadden, 35, Kelvin Davis, 49 and David Carroll, 40. The families of each man want the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office to identify people properly and with a sense of urgency so other mothers and families won’t have to experience the same fate.
“I don’t want another mother to have to go through what I’m going through and for everybody to be accountable for their actions. I want justice for my son,” said Ayanna McFadden, an Austin resident.
Over the last month, the trio has held three protests outside of the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office to emphasize the need for accountability, transparency and policy changes to address gaps in the lack of follow-up and follow-through to prevent similar issues from happening to others.
McFadden’s son Malcolm died on July 20, but she didn’t know that he died until she filed a missing persons report on Aug. 15 at the 15th District Police station in Austin. Three hours after filing a report, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) called her with the news.
“I found out that my son had been electrocuted on the CTA at the Cicero and Lake Green Line,” McFadden said. “My son was in the morgue from July 20 to August 15. [Until after filing a report] I hadn’t gotten a call from the police, the morgue or the CTA. Nobody contacted me.”
McFadden was brought to the CCMEO on July 21. At the time, CPD hadn’t located a family member, according to Natalia Derevyanny, a spokesperson for the CCMEO.
Using information from an ID, the CCMEO conducted a search in Accurint, a public records database, and found a tentative next of kin named Travis McFadden, his brother.
The CCMEO called him and left a voicemail on July 22, but that call wasn’t returned until Aug. 16, Derevyanny wrote to The TRiiBE.
McFadden said she would have preferred to be contacted directly instead of her son, Travis. She noted that she’s lived in the same apartment for 12 years and isn’t hard to find.
McFadden’s brother provided contact information for their mother, and the CCMEO called her to provide information and resources. In a follow-up interview with The TRiiBE on Dec. 23, McFadden said the CCMEO representative only informed her that her son was there and didn’t offer any resources.
CPD provided McFadden with a list of her son’s belongings. The funeral home took possession of those belongings and gave them to McFadden. She was given a sealed bag containing multiple forms of identification, including his photo ID, a Link card and public library card.
“Malcolm was very loving. He was very kind. He didn’t bother anybody. I hate to talk about this. When you’re in a situation like this, it could really make you lose your mind, to be a mother and have to lose your child this way,” she said.
McFadden said she still hasn’t received a police report, even after making a separate trip in person to police headquarters at 35th and Michigan on Aug. 20. She still doesn’t know the circumstances of her son’s death. She added that she’s requested to receive the police report by email or through the mail, but she hasn’t received anything.
The TRiiBE filed public records requests with the CPD for police reports for McFadden, Davis and Carroll.
In addition, The TRiiBE also reached out to the Chicago Transit Authority for comment regarding McFadden’s death but hasn’t heard back yet.
“The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office extends our deepest sympathies to the families of Kelvin Davis, Malcolm McFadden and David Carroll. Our Office handles well over 7,000 cases each year,” Derevyanny wrote.
“The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office takes pride in the work we do to ensure that decedents under our care are treated in a dignified and respectful manner,” Derevyanny continued. “We work with investigating agencies to help find their next of kin, but as in the cases above, at times, there are extenuating circumstances that hinder our ability to locate relatives as quickly as we would like.”
Ruthie McKinnie is a West Rogers Park resident and the mother of Kelvin Davis, who went missing on June 3. After not hearing from him for three weeks, McKinnie was encouraged by Davis’ sister, Deborah, to file a police report. She did so on July 9 and provided Chicago police with identifying information such as freckles and tattoos, one of which says, “I love Mom.”
McKinnie also called the morgue to see if her son was there but says she was told no one matching her son’s description was there. On July 10, she was notified by a representative from the CCMEO that he’d been at the morgue since June 3 under the wrong name. His first name was misspelled.
“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t talk,” McKinnie recalled when she learned the news about her son. “At that point, my daughter said, all I was saying was, ‘I gotta put him to rest. I gotta put him to rest. I gotta get him.’ That’s what I did. We buried him at Maryhill on July 18.”
According to Derevyanny, when Davis arrived at the morgue, he had no physical identification, and his date of birth wasn’t confirmed. The CCMEO relied on identification provided from CPD’s contact with a friend Davis was staying with on the South Side.
Derevyanny said the friend gave the wrong spelling of his name. His family said the friend told CPD that his name was Kelvin, but CPD spelled his name incorrectly on the police report, his sister said in a follow-up interview with The TRiiBE on Dec. 23.
The ME’s office worked with CPD to confirm his identity, which was delayed because he had an estimated 15 aliases, according to CPD. After confirming his name and date of birth with CPD, CCMEO contacted McKinnie and her son’s remains were released the following day.
CPD has also not yet returned his belongings, which were found at the scene, according to Davis’ sister. She added that her brother experienced homelessness and always carried a backpack that included his belongings as well as multiple forms of identification.
It wasn’t until after Davis’ funeral that his family realized how long he’d been lying in the morgue, unidentified — 39 days.
“We didn’t realize the impact of everything until after he was buried,” Davis’ sister, Deborah Davis-Smith, recalled.
“He was one of a kind. He was my brother and my only sibling. When he was in high school, he was a great basketball player,” she said.
Davis played basketball at Mather High School and was included in the Sports Almanac. He also participated in a downstate dunk contest when he was in high school.
The siblings spoke frequently, and their last conversation was on June 1. Davis had a history of mental health and substance abuse issues, but he was trying to do better, his sister shared.
During their last conversation, she learned he would be staying with a friend who lives in Morgan Park, which is on the South Side. An autopsy revealed he died from complications related to cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy.
“God took my son, but I’m trying to find out information to be able to grieve,” McKinnie said, referring to her interactions with representatives from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. “If there’s no accountability, it’s going to keep happening. I don’t want this to keep happening. This is painful.”
David Carroll was a resident of Logan Square and went missing in July 2021, according to his mother, Christine Muniz.
“The police basically said that he wasn’t worth looking for, that it was up to us to find him because he was a grown man,” Muniz said, referring to her conversations with CPD.
Around September 2021, she remembers calling the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office daily, looking for her son, but she was told he wasn’t there.
On Sept. 22, she learned from a representative from the coroner’s office that her son was there and had been in the morgue for 52 days unclaimed. He was listed in the coroner’s system as a Black male, but he’s Irish, Muniz explained.
“He had five IDs in his pocket. He had a social security card and a blood donor card, and he was a carpenter, so he had a union card,” Muniz said.
Chicago police found his body on Aug. 2, 2021, in an apartment 15 minutes from his Logan Square home. The circumstances of his death are still unknown because there wasn’t an autopsy or investigation conducted, she said.
Muniz said she feels like, in addition to the identification that was found with him, investigators could have also used fingerprints to determine her son’s identity because he’d been formerly incarcerated.
“I had to have him cremated because there was really nothing left of him at that point. He sat in the apartment he was in, and he decomposed really bad,” Muniz said.
She held a memorial for her son in 2022, and that’s all she could do, she added. Today, more than three years after her son’s death, Muniz understands the type of pain other mothers like McKinnie and McFadden feel every day.
In response to questions about how the department responds to and handles missing person cases, a CPD spokesperson sent the following statement to The TRiiBE:
“The Chicago Police Department works to investigate missing persons cases in a complete and thorough manner, with the hope that the individuals involved are safely reunited with their loved ones. This year, the Department has taken several steps to strengthen missing persons investigations, enhance documentation, and provide support to persons reporting an individual as missing.”
According to Muniz’s lawyer, Chris Jahnke, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted an investigation into her son’s case about three years ago and found multiple instances of similar neglect. As a result, recommendations were made to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The recommendations included hiring grief counselors to work with family members regarding unclaimed remains, improving communication between departments within the coroner’s office to share updates on unclaimed remains, and ensuring that supervisors are immediately notified when inconsistencies are found with a decedent’s remains, among other measures and more. These recommendations were shared during a Cook County Board of Commissioners committee meeting in April 2022.
“Maybe they followed them for a little while. Apparently, not because this was two to three years before Ruthie’s case,” Jahnke said, referring to McKinnie.
This past July, Muniz filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Chicago, Cook County, Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, Chicago police detectives and other officers.
“What we really want is accountability, transparency and some change. We always hear from them that, ‘Oh, we’re sorry, our condolences.’’’ ‘But that doesn’t mean anything because they’re not doing anything,” Jahnke said. “You see three mothers out here today, but they’re not the only ones. A quick Google search would show you that there have been others before them.”
Jahnke is also working on behalf of McKinnie, and they are requesting an administrative proceeding with the coroner’s office to review the circumstances surrounding what happened to her son. They also want to involve the OIG and compel the department to take action.
The Chief Cook County Medical Examiner is Dr. Ponni Arunkum. She was first appointed to the role by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in 2016 and was reappointed to a second term in 2021.
“Policy needs to be changed, and the police should actually do their job and do an investigation,” Muniz said. “Listen to the mothers. We know what we’re talking about when we’re calling. Why aren’t they taking care of it? Because it doesn’t matter to them. It’s just a job.”
