Ohio plane crash victim cremated by mistake
pilot Arthur Potter, 67, and passenger Frank Granato Jr., 55 — were on board a small plane that crashed in rural Union County on March 5. The red single-engine 2007 Evektor-Aerotechnik SportStar Plus was found in a wooded area about 75 miles northeast of Dayton after the plane failed to make a scheduled refueling stop at the Union County Airport.
The body of Granato, formerly from New Castle, Pa., was sent to Potter's family in Greenwood, Ind., and cremated. Potter's body was sent to New Castle for burial by Granato's family, said Ken Betz, director of the Montgomery County coroner's office in Dayton.
The problem was discovered last week when one of the families reported receiving the wrong personal effects, Betz said.
Potter's wife, Deborah Potter, of Greenwood, Ind., declined to comment Friday. A person answering the phone at Granato's residence in Carmel, Ind., also declined to comment.
Union County coroner Dr. David Applegate responded to the crash scene. He said Friday that the badly injured bodies could not be positively identified and he sent them to the Montgomery County coroner's office for identification from dental records.
Applegate said the Montgomery County coroner's office later told him that body bags used to transport the bodies to their office were mislabeled at the crash scene.
"There was doubt all the way through, because we couldn't positively identify the bodies there," Applegate said. "We thought because of the wallets and clothing that we could make a reasonable preliminary identification and labeled the bags to be helpful."
Applegate said he knew the Montgomery County coroner's office would make the positive identification.
"From now on we will not do any preliminary identification, even on the bags, when there are multiple victims and there is any doubt," he said.
Betz said that the Montgomery County office identified the remains through dental records but didn't notice the conflict with the initial IDs.
"During my tenure at the this office, we have processed over 40,000 bodies, and this is the first time that we have misidentified someone's loved one," Betz said.
Staff at the Montgomery County office took post-mortem dental X-rays and gave those to a forensic dentist along with X-rays provided by the families for comparison, and the dentist put the correct lab numbers on the folders labeled only John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, Betz said.
"When our staff reviewed them we looked at names and conclusions, but overlooked the lab number in the corner," Betz said. "The numbers were switched because they came in that way on the bags, but we should have caught it."
Betz said that when dental identification is required in the future, the forensic pathologist and forensic dentist will have to compare their notes before making positive identification.
Applegate is working with the families and legal authorities to get the remains to the right places
"We know this adds more tragedy for the families, but unfortunately it can't be undone," Applegate said.
(This version CORRECTS Corrects that Montgomery County coroner's office is in Dayton, sted Cincinnati.)
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Ohio 
i /ɵˈhaɪ.oʊ/ is a Midwestern state of the United States.[17] The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,[18] it is the 7th-most populous with nearly 11.5 million residents.[19] The capital of Ohio is Columbus. Ohio, whose name was derived from the Seneca word ohi:yo’, meaning "large creek,"[20][21][22][23][24] was formed primarily from the Ohio Territory and was admitted to the Union as the 17th state[25] (and the first under the Northwest Ordinance)[25] on March 1, 1803.[8] Ohio is known as the "Buckeye State" for its prevalence of Ohio Buckeye trees, and, as such, Ohioans are also known as "Buckeyes."[1]
The government of Ohio is composed of the executive branch, led by the Governor; the legislative branch, which comprises the Ohio General Assembly; and the judicial branch, which is led by the Supreme Court. Currently, Ohio occupies 18 seats in the United States House of Representatives.[26] Ohio is known for its status as both a swing state[27] and a bellwether[27] in national elections.
The population density of Ohio ranks ninth among all U.S. states.[28] Nonetheless, Ohio currently suffers from a negative net population migration,[29] and an increasing rate of unemployment.
Ohio doctor gets 20-to-life in wife’s poison death
Relatives of the victim sobbed and held each other as a judge handed down a life prison term Tuesday for a doctor convicted of killing his wife by lacing her calcium supplement with cyanide so he could be with his mistress.
Yazeed Essa, 41, won't be eligible for parole for at least 20 years.
Essa, who didn't testify at his trial, softly said "yes" when Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Deena Calabrese asked if he wanted to pass up a chance to comment at his sentencing.
But relatives of the victims spoke up, staring him down in an emotionally charged courtroom and challenging him to own up to the slaying.
"Are you a man," asked the victim's brother, Dominic DiPuccio. "It's your last chance to save your soul, right here, right now."
Essa was convicted last week of lacing his wife's calcium supplement with cyanide in 2005. Rosemarie Essa collapsed while driving and crashed her car into another vehicle near the couple's suburban Cleveland home.
Essa, dressed in an orange jail suit and with his hands cuffed in front of him, pushed back in his chair and mostly looked straight ahead as the parents, siblings and friends of his wife spoke to the judge before the sentence was imposed.
Essa wiped his eyes with a tissue at one point, when DiPuccio read a statement that he said he had drafted on behalf of the couple's 7- and 9-year-old children. They are being raised by her family.
"We hold our mommy close to our hearts at night," the statement said. It said the children miss their mother, especially during holiday and special family events.
"She is nowhere to be found except in our hearts," read DiPuccio as family members who packed the courtroom clutched each other and cried. The judge, taking a deep breath, kept casting her eyes downward.
Prosecutors claimed the former emergency room doctor at an Akron hospital killed his wife so he could be with a mistress. The defense tried to blame the killing on a jealous mistress who wanted to marry Essa.
Essa's attorneys said their client couldn't afford a lawyer to handle an appeal and would seek a court-appointed attorney.
Essa's brother, Firas Essa, who changed his testimony and told jurors the defendant admitted to the killing, declined comment after the sentencing.
The defendant's mistress, a nurse, testified that Essa asked before his wife's death if she would stay "if something bad were to happen."
Rosemarie Essa died after taking a calcium tablet and crashing her SUV into an oncoming car near the couple's home in Gates Mills. No one in the other car was hurt. Yazeed Essa, a Detroit native whose family is from a Palestinian territory, fled to Lebanon after police seized drug bottles at his home.
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In the context of biology, poisons are substances that can cause disturbances to organisms,[1] usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism. Legally and in hazardous chemical labeling, poisons are especially toxic substances; less toxic substances are labeled "harmful", "irritant", or not labeled at all.
In medicine (particularly veterinary) and in zoology, a poison is often distinguished from a toxin and a venom. Toxins are poisons produced via some biological function in nature, and venoms are usually defined as biological toxins that are injected by a bite or sting to cause their effect, while other poisons are generally defined as substances which are absorbed through epithelial linings such as the skin or gut.
