Suit: British man buried in NYC as John Doe, unidentified for 5 years despite family’s search

Suit: Man buried in NYC as John Doe despite search

NEW YORK — Richard Massey’s devoted family tried desperately to find him after he disappeared shortly before Christmas 2002.

The British computer programmer’s relatives say they quickly reported him missing and gave police such identifying information as his dental records. They even held a news conference in hopes of eliciting tips.

But after Massey’s body was found in a river in March 2003, authorities buried him as an unknown man in a city cemetery — where he remained unidentified for more than five years, his mother says in a lawsuit. The truth didn’t emerge until a family lawyer traced his body to a city morgue, another family attorney said.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, accuses the city, police and medical examiners of negligence and depriving Margaret Massey of the right to bury her son. It seeks unspecified damages.

Richard Massey’s sister, Katie, told a newspaper that police had suggested her brother might simply have gone on vacation.

“My mother’s worst nightmare was that he would end up unidentified and buried on his own,” she told the Yorkshire Post in 2008. “We were told that would not happen, but it did.”

Police referred calls to the city Law Department, where spokeswoman Connie Pankratz said Wednesday that Massey’s “death was tragic and we will carefully review the matter.” The medical examiners’ office declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Massey was 27 and was working for an investment firm in New York when he vanished after being released from a hospital on Dec. 19, 2002. He apparently had suffered some emotional problems, said James Modzelewski, a lawyer for Margaret Massey.

The Doncaster, England-based family talked to the missing man’s friends and tried to track him through his credit cards, Modzelewski said. His relatives made a public plea for information at a July 2003 press conference — unaware his body had already been pulled from the Hudson River, autopsied and buried, according to the family.

The information Massey’s family gave police apparently wasn’t matched to his body until 2008, when another attorney made inquiries as part of the process of seeking a legal declaration of his death, Modzelewski said. DNA tests confirmed Massey’s identity, he said.

Massey was exhumed, and his remains were buried in Doncaster, a town in South Yorkshire, in 2008.

It’s unclear how he died, medical examiner’s spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said Wednesday.

The lawsuit comes less than a year after another missing person, 16-year-old Tiana Rice, was found to have been dead and in a city morgue for a month while her family looked for her. She had died of an asthma attack she suffered while being raped.

Tiana initially was mistakenly identified from another person’s driver’s license, which was found near her body in an abandoned home. An anthropologist later realized her body didn’t match the age of the person on the driver’s license.