Coroner drags obese woman’s body from home & hauls it tow truck

INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana — 48-year-old Teresa Smith who weighed nearly 750 pounds was dragged from her apartment still on her mattress.

The deputy coroner from Marion County has come under fire since the incident where the deceased 13-year-old son and boyfriend watched in horror as her body was dragged across the courtyard wrapped in carpet.

Unable to fit her in the van her body was cradled in the air using a local flatbed tow truck.

David Johnson, the boyfriend said “I think they should have handled it differently, putting her on a flatbed like they did. That was like putting a cow up there.”

While there are no official guidelines for handling obese a flatbed truck has been used in the past.

Officials are still looking for a way to move the body from the morgue to the funeral home.

The former Chief Deputy Coroner John Linehan was shocked by the way the body was handled.

He said, “When they scoop up dead dogs off of the street they don’t treat them that way. It’s just not the way to treat a human being.”

One neighbor of the dead woman agreed saying, “What really got me is when they took her off onto the flatbed, they threw this dirty, dirty carpet on top of her, and I just thought that was so disrespectful. I would have never let them throw that on my loved one.”

From the Indy Channel