A security guard allegedly had sex with an elderly woman’s corpse inside of a morgue freezer at a hospital where he worked.
Randall Scott Bird, 46, volunteered to handle the intake of a 79-year-old deceased woman’s body arriving at a morgue from Banner University Medical Center, as was his duty, according to a probable cause statement.
Video surveillance showed the corpse arriving at the hospital’s morgue in Phoenix, Arizona, on the afternoon of October 22. The transport person departed five minutes later, leaving Bird alone with the deceased, the statement reads.
Less than an hour later, two other security guards went to the morgue to intake two more bodies and ‘found the main double door entrance locked from the inside which was unusual’, according to the probable cause statement obtained by The Smoking Gun on Wednesday.
The two guards unlocked the morgue door and opened the large freezer door, at which point they saw Bird inside ‘sweating profusely and was acting very nervous’, the statement reads.
‘Randall had removed his duty belt, which they observed on top of a gurney where a bagged deceased body was placed,’ it states. ‘Randalls zipper on his uniform pants was wide open and the rest of his uniform looked all messy.’
Witnesses also saw that the dead woman’s body bag ‘had been completely unzipped open. The victims gown had been rolled up above her belly button area, exposing her naked body from the waist down’.
The victim was face down on the gurney. The two witnesses said the deceased are never placed facing down and that body bags are never unzipped.
‘Randall immediately was trying to cover the deceased body, by trying to pull her hospital gown down,’ the statement reads. ‘Randall started making statements about having a medical episode and fainting, and said he grabbed the victims body as he fell.’
He claimed that the body bag tore open and the zipper broke, but neither were actually as described.
The witnesses reported the incident to their supervisor, initiating an internal and police investigation. Detectives collected DNA evidence from the scene and sent it to a lab. The examination results included that the victim had ‘post mortem fractures on the ribs on the left posterior’, and that she had not received CPR before dying, according to the statement.
In an interview on October 25, Bird said he suffered a medical episode in the freezer and could not remember what happened. He had biological swabs taken via a search warrant.
Lab results found that male DNA was on swabs of the victim’s genitals and breasts. Bird was ‘identified as the male contributor on the external genital swabs as well as the vulvar vestibular swabs’, according to the statement.
Bird was arrested on Tuesday and charged with multiple felony counts of crimes against a dead person. He is free on supervised release until his preliminary court hearing slated in December. Bird was fired from the hospital.
He was taken into custody just weeks after a husband and wife owning a ‘green’ Colorado funeral home were arrested for allegedly having at least 189 decaying bodies stored there improperly.
And in June, a Harvard Medical School morgue manager was charged for allegedly stealing human remains from mortuaries and selling them to make money.
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