Family Mystery Ends in Sorrow, but Also Anger
By SUSAN SAULNY

Published: July 30, 2004 (New York Times)

The bright yellow posters that read "Missing since May 2, 2003'' went up almost immediately after Charles Guglielmini, a senior at Brooklyn College, left his mother's apartment for a church group retreat and disappeared. Mr. Guglielmini, 24, had a history of depression.

The police arrived at the small Astoria, Queens, apartment of Mr. Guglielmini's mother, Francesca, soon after she last saw her son. A young man had jumped off the 59th Street Bridge, they said. A backpack had been recovered. In it were two Bibles, and Mr. Guglielmini's name.

But that was all the police could say. No body had been found.

The family fought the urge to think the worst. Perhaps, they thought, Mr. Guglielmini had simply dropped his bag. Perhaps he had been robbed. Maybe he had eloped and would be returning soon with a new bride. Mr. Guglielmini's sister, Lina Tagliaferri, said the police told her that her brother had been registered as a missing person. She said she called the police almost every day to see if a body had been recovered. The answer was always no.

Then, last Friday, more than a year later, she learned that her brother had indeed been found just days after he disappeared. She was astounded to learn that he was buried almost a year ago in the potter's field on Hart Island, off City Island in the Bronx. Ms. Tagliaferri, 40, a teacher, says she also learned that her brother had never been listed as a missing person. That is why his description was never matched to the body pulled from the East River right after he disappeared.

The discovery provided a moment of comfort. "His bones will come, and I will know where to put a flower," said Mrs. Guglielmini, 67, a native of Sicily who works at a McDonald's restaurant in Queens.

But it also brought anger about the apparent mishandling of the case. Mrs. Guglielmini intends to bring a civil lawsuit against the city on the grounds of negligence, according to a notice of claim her lawyer, Joseph W. Belluck, said he would file today.

Mr. Belluck (who is related to a New York Times reporter) tried to put the situation in context: "In the aftermath of Sept. 11," he said, "everybody has an idea of how important it is to retrieve the remains of loved ones and have a proper burial. The City of New York has a responsibility to its residents to do this the right way."

A spokeswoman for the city's Law Department, Kate O'Brien Ahlers, said the city was awaiting legal papers and therefore could not comment. A spokeswoman for the Police Department, too, said that legal papers had not been received, and she declined to comment.

According to the notice of claim, Mrs. Guglielmini "relied on the New York City Police Department's assurances that it was investigating her son's disappearance and trying to locate her son.'' The department, the claim says, "told the claimant not to conduct her own search efforts."

But the family did. And that's how, they say, they discovered the Police Department's error.

Having grown frustrated with the lack of results from the detective assigned to her brother's case, Ms. Tagliaferri called the city's morgue after reading a news report in the spring about bodies surfacing in the East River. After speaking to a morgue official, she said, she realized they had no information about her brother in their database.

"I made the connection that his name was not there," she said. "A light bulb went off. I realized that he could have never been found."

Ms. Tagliaferri then filed the report she thought had been in the system for months.

(According to a copy of the complaint filed a day after Mr. Guglielmini disappeared, he was classified as "missing person, male." Ms. Tagliaferri said the detective on the case assured her that he had completed the necessary paperwork, but never showed her any documents and never produced a file number.)

Within weeks of filing the new report with the morgue, she got a call to look at a picture of a body that had washed up on May 22 last year. That was about two weeks after her brother disappeared.

"The hair was similar, the lips were the same, height and weight fit him, but the face was decomposed, so I requested DNA testing," she said. "We wanted to know for sure."

Another call came after the testing, last Friday. The body was her brother's.

"We felt relief," Ms. Tagliaferri said. "I'm happy I found my brother."

Mr. Belluck said the medical examiner's office had issued a request to the Department of Correction, which controls the potter's field, to exhume Mr. Guglielmini's body.

"The family is motivated to try to make changes so this doesn't happen again," Mr. Belluck said. "How many families are out there searching for their loved ones, only to find that the body's been found and buried as an 'unknown person' by the city? They want to make sure they are the last family this happens to."

Mrs. Guglielmini wants to see her son buried next to his father in St. Michael's Cemetery in Astoria. Calogero Guglielmini died a few months ago in his son's room, where he often spent time.

Said Ms. Tagliaferri: "I want to have a Mass, and at the cemetery, I want doves to fly."