By Melvin Singh

FOR more than three weeks, Mr Aries Jasuwito's body lay in a morgue run by the Health Sciences Authority (HSA).
Meanwhile, his family was frantically searching for him. They are from Indonesia, and with their limited knowledge of local procedures, they had to call the police and various hospitals.

The New Paper also called the various agencies.

Like Mr Aries' family, we ran into a tangle of bureaucratic red tape.

Not our problem, said one. Call them. They are in charge, said another. Call them.

Here is the family's dilemma.

When Mr Aries went missing, the report was lodged at one police division. His death was investigated by another.

He was taken, barely alive, to Changi General Hospital (CGH). But when he died, he was not kept at the mortuary there. His was deemed an unnatural death and his body was sent to the HSA morgue at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH).

SGH has two morgues, one run by the hospital and the other by HSA.

The one run by HSA does the post-mortems for unnatural deaths.

Are these foreign visitors expected to know all this? For that matter, how many Singaporeans would know?

Between the time he went missing and his death, Mr Aries did not change his clothes - white T-shirt with grey sleeves and blue jeans.

The family provided his physical description in the police report as they did with each call they made to the hospitals.

They handed out fliers and pounded the streets hoping that someone would solve the mystery of their missing loved one.

It would be so easy to pin the blame on the police officer who took down the missing persons report if he had failed to send out an alert.

But it is the collective responsibility of all agencies to put themselves in the shoes of the next-of-kin.

A young man's body lay in the morgue. Did it not occur to someone at the morgue that three weeks had passed without the corpse being identified?

Is it so hard for someone to cross-check with the various police divisions on behalf of the family?

Meanwhile, the family was outside SGH handing out fliers, still hoping for a miracle, when Mr Aries' body was lying at the HSA morgue just a few minutes' walk away.

His family is thankful to the police that he was found. But the incredible tangle they went through should not be forgotten.

In the end, Mr Aries could have been given more dignity in his death.

If only someone had cared.