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They made a grave error.
A desperate woman spent more than a year searching for her missing brother who vanished in NYC –only to find out he had died and was buried in a pauper’s grave because “careless” hospital workers misspelled his name by one wrong letter, according to a lawsuit.
Staff at Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai West hospital bungled the spelling of 50-year-old Robert Maguire’s name on official paperwork, the suit alleges.
According to city records, the letter “g” was changed to a “q” and wrongly rendering it on the documents as “Maquire.”
Because of the small but consequential error, the filing claims no family was able to be found for the 50-year-old, down-on-his-luck welder after he went missing during a brief, 2025 layover at at Midtown’s Port Authority Bus Terminal while on a trip to Pennsylvania.
With no next of kin, the city treated Maguire as an unclaimed “John Doe” and kept his body in a cold morgue for months before burying him on Hart Island that May — all without his family’s knowledge or consent, the suit says.
“Due to the defendants’ failures to search or failure to search properly and misspelling the decedent’s last name, the decedent was instead caused to be buried on Hart Island,” the suit alleges.
After Maguire went missing, his desperate family searched relentlessly for him, but because of the paperwork spelling error, their searches turned up empty, the suit claims.
That means the family never knew that after arriving at Port Authority during his NYC layover, he fell ill and was admitted to Mt. Sinai West on January 13, 2025 — where he died two days later, according to the lawsuit.
When he was admitted, he was carrying proper ID and the hospital correctly recording his date of birth — but at some point staff took his name down wrong, the family claims.
According to the city’s Hart Island lookup tool, he was registered as “Maquire.”
The simple mistake left his family — including sister Kathy Troutman who filed the lawsuit this week — living a year-long nightmare.
Troutman said in an interview with the missing persons podcast “The Vanished,” that her brother had been traveling from his home in Wilmington, Del., to see a cousin Pennsylvania when the family had lost track of him.
“Bobby never made it to my cousin,” Troutman said. “He just disappeared.”
They filed a missing persons report after he vanished — and endlessly called the NYPD, Port Authority, and the Medical Examiner’s office.
The distraught family begged authorities to look for Maguire, who has a highly recognizable, heavily bandaged right arm — the result of a horrific, bone-deep dog bite that required major surgery and left his arm basically useless, they told the podcast.
“That’s why we’ve called the medical examiner’s office several times,” Troutman said in her podcast interview. “Do you have this person with a terrible arm injury?”
But because of the clerical error, the family was repeatedly told no such person existed, according to the suit — only learning the truth just three days shy of the anniversary of his death.
It wasn’t clear exactly how the mistake was discovered or how Maguire’s body was found by his family, members of which did not return requests for comment. Troutman’s attorney declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit claims the city still hasn’t returned Bobby’s body to his family.
Troutman’s suit accuses the city and hospital of “pure carelessness,” arguing a simple search would have easily located his next of kin.
The city’s medical examiner’s office claims it conducted a next-of-kin search based on the misspelled hospital data, but declined to comment on whether they were asked to look for his distinctive physical injuries or if Maguire has been disinterred from Hart Island yet.
Lucia Lee, a spokesperson for Mount Sinai, said “it would be inappropriate to comment” on pending litigation, but noted the network has strict patient identification protocols.
“We’ve been lost on our own with all this,” Troutman said in the podcast, sharing that she suspected her brother’s tough times may have led to a less than diligent search for him.
No cause of death has been revealed for Maguire as the city medical examiner’s office didn’t do an autopsy because he died in a hospital of what was recorded as natural causes. The family said he had substance abuse issues, and had been living in a tent because he was unable to work before his death.
“It’s a shame because it doesn’t make you any less lovable,” she said, “It doesn’t make you any less cared for.”
“Everybody matters, no matter who it is,” Maguire’s dad, Ron, told the podcast. “These people may have had a traumatic experience throughout their life — you matter.”
English (US)