A former Orange County coroner’s official pushed back in court Tuesday, April 5, against conspiracy theories reportedly advanced by a father and daughter who buried a stranger thought to be their loved one in 2017.

David Ralsten, who was deputy coroner for the county at the time, took the stand during the second day of testimony during a civil trial to determine if Frank J. Kerrigan, 86, of Wildomar and his 60-old-daughter, Carole Meikle of Silverado, should be awarded damages for the body mix-up.

Eleven days after a funeral for Kerrigan’s son, Frankie, the family discovered he was still alive.

Kerrigan and Meikle filed a lawsuit alleging the Coroner’s Office engaged in intentional misrepresentation for erroneously informing them that Frankie Kerrigan, who was homeless and suffering from schizophrenia at the time, had been found dead behind a Fountain Valley Verizon store on May 6, 2017, and identified through fingerprints. However, that was untrue.

When the fingerprint results did finally come back, it was determined they were those of John Dickens, a 54-year-old Kansas native who had died from an enlarged heart and cardiovascular disease.

Norm Watkins, an attorney representing the county, questioned Ralsten about wild rumors regarding the identification error that he said were circulated by Frank Kerrigan and his daughter.

One of those theories was that the Coroner’s Office attempted to cover up its initial mistake by releasing a body to Frank Kerrigan that appeared to resemble his son, Watkins said.

“What would stop you from switching it (a body)?” Watkins asked Ralsten.

“Ethics, moral integrity and a sense of right and wrong,”  the former deputy coroner replied.

Ralsten readily acknowledged that the misidentification occurred partially because a Fountain Valley police officer told him the man found dead in some bushes behind the Verizon store looked like Frankie Kerrigan, who was 57 at the time.

Ralsten said he then used a photo from Frankie Kerrigan’s 11-year-old driver’s license to compare with the dead man’s face, which was partially obscured by vomit and dried blood.

“Obviously, I was mistaken in my visual comparison,” he said.

Although fingerprints had been taken from the body, results needed to positively identify the dead man had not yet been received by the Coroner’s Office when Kerrigan was notified that his son was dead.

Ralsten said he became concerned about a possible identification error on May 17, 2017, when he spoke by phone with Kerrigan, who was puzzled that some of the personal items released by the Coroner’s Office did not appear to belong to his son.

However, Ralsten testified that any “lingering doubt” he had was erased when the elder Kerrigan said he had viewed his son’s body at the funeral home. The father later would explain that he just glanced at the body and was so overcome by grief he didn’t realize it wasn’t his son.

An elaborate funeral followed at Holy Family Catholic Church in Orange and 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..

Less than two weeks later, Kerrigan received a telephone call from a longtime family friend who had served as a pallbearer at the funeral. Frankie Kerrigan was alive, he said, and standing on the patio of his home in Stanton.

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