The person responsible for the overcrowding of corpses in the Complutense is released from prison by agreeing with the Prosecutor's Office

The former director of the Department of Human Anatomy and Embryology II of the Faculty of Medicine of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) José Ramón Mérida Velasco will be released from prison by agreeing with the Madrid Prosecutor's Office on an 18-month prison sentence against the 8 years that are initially requested.

The conformity agreement materialized this morning in a hearing held in the Criminal Courts of Madrid, on whose bench Mérida has sat down due to the subhuman conditions of the facilities due to the overcrowding of corpses.

In accordance with the agreement, he accepts a sentence of three months in prison for a crime against the workers and another three months for every five crimes of which he is accused against moral integrity.. In addition, he is disqualified from exercising the right to passive suffrage and from exercising the position of director of the Department during the time of the sentence.

In the same way, a 3-month fine is imposed with a daily fee of 10 euros, with the responsibility. With regard to prison sentences, the prosecutor does not oppose the suspension conditional on payment of the aforementioned amounts and not committing crimes for a period of two years.

Specifically, the prosecutor initially requested three for a crime against the health of workers and one for each of the five crimes against moral integrity. The private prosecution, which is exercised by the lawyer José Luis Vegas on behalf of those affected, raised his request to 21 years in prison and 264,000 euros in compensation.

Work in unsanitary conditions

According to the prosecutor's account, the doctor forced the workers for years to provide their services “in unhealthy, degrading, harmful and dangerous conditions.”

As a result of the Labor and Social Security Inspectorate ordering the stoppage of all work in 2014, when the responsibilities were cleared up by the rectory of the University, 534 corpses were extracted from the basement.

The indictment denounces the way in which Mérida subjected the workers “to unnecessarily degrading painful conditions that transcended the labor sphere.”

And this because for years he “systematically” neglected the “fair” demands of the workers “at the same time that he blamed and reproached them for the situation of overflow that he caused, without providing any solution.”

One of their complaints was that they were forced to provide their services in a basement without ventilation that lacked the most basic hygiene conditions “to the point that the presence of insects, worms and larvae was frequent, surrounded by human remains piled up anarchically and submerged.” in the permanent stench of putrefaction”.

Mérida, thanks to her position, was the main person in charge of the direction, control and surveillance of the working conditions of the laboratory technical personnel.

“The fear of job loss, the worsening of their physical and mental condition, the impossibility of maintaining order in their workplace due to the overflow of the work environment, the lack of respect and appreciation of the tasks they carried out in degrading conditions, plunged the workers into a state of hopelessness that caused alterations in the perception of the reality that surrounded them, in such a way that they accepted as inevitable and normal a situation that, objectively, constituted a permanent violation of their dignity as human beings”, denounces the Prosecutor's Office.

Thus, the defendant ordered the technicians the jobs they had to perform or entrusted them with cleaning and disinfection tasks of surgical equipment, tables, and surfaces.

However, the representative of the Public Ministry maintains that the characteristics of the workplace and the circumstances in which the defendant directed the work activity of the technicians “determined the creation of a serious risk to the health, physical and mental integrity of the workers “.

Such circumstances were known to Mérida “as well as the risks derived from them due to his status as a doctor and Director of the Department of Anatomy”. For example, the technicians worked in a basement “that lacked adequate ventilation” so that everyone was exposed to the inhalation of gases.

Even the Prosecutor's Office warns that there was “no special enclosure that prevented the vapors of said substance from being concentrated and not spreading through the various rooms and corridors or from using various potentially carcinogenic chemical products on a daily basis.”

Regarding the cold room where a large number of corpses were kept, when it broke down, the defendant ordered the technicians to extract between 40 and 50 bodies from it and leave them in a room to be cremated.

“However, since it was not possible to proceed with the cremation of the bodies due to their high number, they remained in said room in the process of deterioration or rotting,” adds the Prosecutor's Office.

Breach of regulations

To solve the problem, Mérida ordered the installation of another motor “but it was also insufficient and formed layers of ice on the corpses that had to be removed four or five days before use and, after that, they were reintroduced into the chamber in process.” of decomposition”.

The facilities, as stated in the indictment, did not comply with the regulations for workplaces since “the workers did not have showers, adequate toilets, changing rooms or individual lockers.”

Nor was the teaching use of the corpses the most appropriate because the bodies entered the basement without protocol of action, without identification and without reference to their origin or suffering from infectious-contagious diseases.

“This lack of sanitary control of access to bodies -explains the Prosecutor's Office- determined that the workers were exposed to biological, infectious and/or parasitic risks, which were aggravated by the lack of adequate control over the health of the technicians” .

But it is that, in addition, the workers wore inadequate clothing to carry out their tasks and the hygiene conditions were “deficient”. So much so that in January 2014 larvae, worms and insects began to appear.

The indictment also shows that the technicians carried out their duties in the “permanent” presence of a strong stench of putrefaction, that they handled manually and “repetitively” loads whose weight ranged between 70 and 120 kilos or that they were ordered to ” introduce the bodies into vats one and a half meters deep and extract them from the bottom for their use or destruction”.