vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #163 / Social life / Reading article...

The city has cut off funding for an agency that transports dead bodies to the morgue, leaving policemen — and sometimes private citizens — to remove corpses from Vladivostok’s streets and apartments.

SpetsService, a private agency formerly paid by the Vladivostok Mayor’s Office, stopped transporting bodies Feb. 28, except when friends or families pay 200 new rubles. Few people can afford the fee, said Deputy Police Chief Anatoly Petrusha, and when the victim is homeless, there is no one to claim the body anyway.

This leaves police to respond, sometimes with the help of motorists who happen by the death scene, whether it’s a homicide, a car accident, or home where an elderly person has expired in a bath tub, Petrusha said.

“We are forced to stop private cars to make them deliver the bodies,” he said. “Maybe it’s a violation, too, but we can’t help it. Sometimes we have to stop bread trucks because you can’t do anything else.”

Cherepkov stopped paying SpetsService when he was reinstated in 1996, Petrusha said. SpetsService Director Yevgeny Osokin said the private company, created by mayoral decree in 1994, has no choice but to cut off transportation of bodies.

“We just don’t have money,” Osokin told the daily Vladivostok. “Not single kopeck. The gas station doesn’t serve us on credit any more. We can’t afford to buy 10 liters of gas to keep even one truck on duty.”

The city press center declined to comment. It referred questions Deputy City Mayor Nikolai Medetsky, who couldn’t immediately be reached.

The conclusion of SpetsService’s contract is the latest in a series of canceled city services. The city cut off money to its hospitals and maternity wards last summer. Infection and tuberculosis clinics have lost money, and the city stopped funding to orphanages.

An average of 1,000 people die each year in the city, Petrusha said. For cops on the beat, SpetsService’s problems create a grim new responsibility. In Frunzensky District, police must hitch a small trailer to the back of a car and haul the body in the open bed to the morgue.

Sgt. Maj. Vasily Naplyokin, a Fruzensky District assistant duty officer, said he responded to the scene of an 82-year-old woman who had died in her apartment. Police ended up hauling the body away.

“We have to do that,” Naplyokin said. “You can’t just leave it lying there.”

When the latest crisis started, Naplyokin responded to an apartment where an elderly alcoholic man had died. Police were told that SpetsService would take away the body, and they left it.

“But the next day a neighbor went in and gave us a call,” Naplyokin said. “The body was still there.’

Osokin, the SpetsService director, said the Mayor’s Office has the right to stop the contract, but SpetsService wants its back pay.

“We never wanted to quarrel with the mayor’s office,” Osokin said. “But now we don’t see any other way out but to go to the Arbitration Court.”

Petrusha said deaths among street people are worse during the bitter winter months. Many people die of exposure. Police tried to help, spending 792,000 old rubles to build a shelter for the homeless.

“We equipped it,” Petrusha said. “We were ready to operate it to house poor people, former convicts, people who don’t have a job. But the city wouldn’t give us the money to run it.”

Police tend to be stoic about their new duties. “As long as we go out to the scene and respond to a dead body, people think we should clean it up,” Petrusha said. “And we have to, because there’s nobody else.”