St. Croix may soon have its long-awaited morgue, potentially lessening delays and expense in flying corpses to and from St. Thomas for autopsies, Attorney General Gordon Rhea said Tuesday.
Storing and examining bodies in St. Croix has long been a problem — from infrastructure breakdowns enabling rapid decomposition to key staffing shortages.
In 2025, the Justice Department shipped an average of one body a week from St. Croix to St. Thomas for examination. Transporting 52 corpses cost tax payers $112,000, Rhea said.
Plumbing and other problems plaguing Juan F. Luis hospital hindered plans to revive its autopsy suite, so in 2022 the Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Denise George, arranged for a mobile morgue, Rhea said. The containers that were to become that unit still sit at the Wilfred “Bomba” Allick Port and Transshipment Center, draped in big blue tarps. They could be put into action as soon as April.
In an open letter responding to correspondence from Sen. Kenneth Gittens, Rhea said he shared the senator’s concern about the lack of morgue facilities. Corrective action was not easy, however.
“I can assure you that difficulties and obstacles encountered in obtaining a morgue on St. Croix and getting medical examiners paid have been a severe frustration, not only for the people of the Virgin Islands, but to me as well. I can assure you the delays have not been for a lack of trying,” Rhea wrote.
Rhea and team spent several months exploring setting up the mobile morgue in the vacant area where the Ralph de Chabert project once stood, only to settle on the now-vacant lot near Golden Grove where the Toro building had been located.
“Hoping to move the modular morgue to that site soon, we had the land cleared,” Rhea said. “Since then, several developments have frustrated our efforts.”
First, VESTA, the contractor hired to oversee the work, was purchased by another company. This meant the contract had to be renegotiated and the terms subjected to a lengthy review and back-and-forth process with the Property and Procurement Department and other government entities, Rhea said in the letter to Gittens.
Then, unexpectedly, funds designated for the project dried up, the attorney general said.
“ … which led to an arduous process of finding sufficient money to fund the project,” Rhea said. “I am happy to report, however, that we now have the funds necessary to complete the morgue on St. Croix, and my Chief Deputy Attorney General Ian Clement has brought the contract negotiations to near conclusion. We expect to have a final approved contract within the next week or so, which will make it possible to have a morgue and autopsy suite assembled and operable on Saint Croix in April of this year.”
Rhea said the modular morgue housed with the Port Authority was in good shape despite sitting for three years but had required regular maintenance of its waterproof tarp cover.
“We had the building itself examined recently, and it is in generally good shape, although it does need a few repairs which we have been assured can be done in short order,” Rhea said.
The Justice Department was also trying to find and fund another medical examiner — one having left in frustration over unpaid invoices and another staying on despite being owed money. The doctor working in St. Thomas had been able to clear all the territory’s cases, meaning there was no St. Croix autopsy backlog as of Tuesday, Rhea said.
“To help ensure that it stays that way, we are in the process of trying to recruit a second medical examiner, as the workload requires at least two such pathologists. We have located a few possible recruits and have made hiring a suitable second medical examiner a top priority,” the attorney general said. “Trained medical examiners, as you know, are critical for performing autopsies.”
