Body rolls from hearse: 14-year-old girl helped reload corpse

The struggle to lift the body back off the road was photographed by a passerby.

A 14-year-old girl had to hold up the boot of a hearse so the body that fell from it at a busy South Auckland intersection could be pushed back inside.

Lineti Fakapulia was returning home from a shopping trip in Otahuhu with her mother, Alisi, and father, Manese, when the body fell from a Pacific Memorials hearse in front of their car at the Great South Rd-Puhiniui Rd traffic lights in Papatoetoe on Tuesday.

Horrified motorists and nearby workers saw the corpse, strapped to a gurney and covered in a sheet, lying on the road in the rain about 1pm.

Pacific Memorials co-owner Carina Zhang said the driver of the hearse had reported the incident to her.

It had been caused by a faulty latch on the hearse's rear door.

Ms Zhang said the body was undamaged, but the family of the deceased were notified after she learned the Herald was going to publish a story about it.

Mrs Fakapulia and her family were waiting in traffic when they saw it all unfold.

"When he went to drive off, the body bag fell out on the trolley," she said. "It was scary [but] someone had to go out and help because it was blocking the traffic.

Mr Fakapulia rushed to help the hearse driver move the body, but the rear door would not stay up.

"They couldn't push it in because the boot kept falling down. He tried to open the door two, maybe three times but the door kept closing down ... so my daughter walked out and opened up the boot."

She said the teenager was not scared, though the incident had left her husband spooked and he had been having trouble sleeping.

Ms Zhang said the incident was unfortunate but the company had done everything it could to prevent it recurring and the hearse had been repaired.

She said she contacted the family of the person whose body was being transferred from a hospital to the funeral home.

"They expressed their understanding and they accepted our apology.

"We also want to apologise through the newspaper to the public, especially those people involved on the scene."