A father and daughter who thought they had buried a family member in 2017, only to find out later he had been misidentified and was still alive, will go to court Monday, March 21, in an effort to show the Orange County Coroner’s Office was negligent in the bizarre mix-up that garnered international headlines.

Frank J. Kerrigan, 86, of Wildomar and his 60-old-daughter, Carole Meikle of Silverado, are suing Orange County, accusing the Coroner’s Office of intentional misrepresentation for erroneously telling them Kerrigan’s son, Frankie, was dead. They are seeking unspecified damages at trial, which is expected to last as long as two weeks.

“Orange County put us through a tremendous and unnecessary ordeal which could have been avoided had they done their job,” Frank Kerrigan said Friday.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which manages the Coroner’s Office, declined to comment because of the ongoing litigation.

Death shocks family

The strange ordeal began on May 6, 2017, when the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department told Frank Kerrigan to contact the Orange County Coroner’s Office. He placed that call and soon was told that Frankie Kerrigan — who at the time was 57, homeless and suffering from mental illness — had been found dead behind a Verizon store in Fountain Valley.

Kerrigan says he asked if he should identify the body, but a woman at the Coroner’s Office told him that would be unnecessary because the decedent had already been identified through fingerprints. Kerrigan would later find out that apparently wasn’t the case.

Meanwhile, Carole Meikle also learned her brother had died. She rushed to the Verizon store and was directed to a spot near some bushes where Frankie Kerrigan’s body was reported to have been found. It was covered in blood and dirty blankets, leading Meikle to believe her brother’s death was possibly painful and violent, said attorney V. James DeSimone, who is representing her and her father.

“The images of my brother lying there alone in a pool of blood will never go away,” Meikle said.

Crying and praying with a Verizon employee who was there when the body was discovered, Meikle erected a shrine in memory of her brother that included photos, a poem, flowers, a candle and rosary beads.

The next day, after a sleepless night, Meikle contacted the Coroner’s Office and was told by an employee her brother had died peacefully, was not a victim of foul play and had been found with his identification card, a wallet and $56, according to the lawsuit.

Puzzling possessions

Terry Harmon, director of Colonial Family Funeral Care & Cremation, which was handling burial arrangements, was asked by Kerrigan and Meikle to provide them with Frankie Kerrigan’s personal belongings, most importantly his watch and a black attaché case he always carried, the lawsuit says.

When Harmon turned over those purported belongings during a private viewing of Frankie Kerrigan’s body at the funeral home, family members were stunned.

“None of the belongings looked familiar,” the lawsuit says. “There was no identification in the wallet. Moreover, there was no black attaché or watch in the belongings. The family pored over the possessions for anything that appeared familiar.”

At the funeral home, the elder Kerrigan briefly had the casket opened so that he could take a last look at his son. But he was so overcome by grief that he failed to realize it wasn’t Frankie Kerrigan.

“I took a little look and touched his hair,” Kerrigan told the Orange County Register in 2017. “I didn’t know what my dead son was going to look like.”

The family held a $20,000 funeral May 12 that year at Holy Family Catholic Church in Orange. Frankie Kerrigan’s brother, John, gave the eulogy, and about 50 people came from as far as Las Vegas and Washington State.

After the services, the body was interred at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Orange, about 150 feet from the spot where the elder Kerrigan’s late wife, Catherine Kerrigan, is buried.

Frankie is alive

However, the strange tale of Frankie Kerrigan’s supposed death soon took another bizarre turn.

On the evening of May 23, the elder Kerrigan received a telephone call at home. Bill Shinker, a longtime family friend who been a pallbearer at Frankie Kerrigan’s funeral just 11 days earlier, was on the line.

“Are you sitting down?” Shinker asked. “Frankie is alive.”

In fact, Kerrigan’s son was at that moment standing on the patio of Shinker’s former home in Stanton.

“Bill, put my son on the phone,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Hi Dad.’ “

The body the Kerrigans had buried was exhumed and identified through fingerprints as John Dickens, a 54-year-old Kansas native who had died from an enlarged heart and cardiovascular disease.

Missteps and misidentification

The mix-up over who was found dead behind the Verizon store apparently began when a responding Fountain Valley police officer told the coroner’s worker that, based on prior contacts, he believed the person was Frankie Kerrigan, DeSimone said.

Along the way, the Coroner’s Office ignored several red flags and made various missteps, he added.

For example, a Fountain Valley Fire Department incident report listed the dead man as having long dark hair and weighing about 250 pounds, DeSimone said. Frankie Kerrigan has short light hair and weighs no more than 170 pounds.

Orange County Deputy Coroner David Ralsten obtained Frankie Kerrigan’s 11-year-old driver’s license photo and misidentified him despite obvious differences in weight and facial features between him and the deceased individual, DeSimone said.

Although fingerprints were taken, Kerrigan was hastily notified of his son’s death before the body was even checked in at the Coroner’s Office, he added.

Due to a massive misunderstanding of the Coroner Office’s fingerprint system and training failures, Ralsten apparently was not aware that the fingerprints came back with hits, matching the body to Dickens, according to DeSimone.

Coroner’s employees also deceived the Kerrigan family with false assurances about the way Frankie Kerrigan was identified and were well aware of the misidentification, DeSimone said.

“The Orange County Coroner’s Office did not want to admit to their identification error and instead released a body with the belief that no one would care because Franke Kerrigan is mentally ill and homeless,” he said.