A GRIEVING mother faces an anxious wait to find out what state her son's body was in when he was buried.

Before first light yesterday, the tiny coffin of Simon Pearson was exhumed, more than 28 years after he was laid to rest in Castletown Cemetery, Sunderland.

Simon died in December 1974, aged 22 months, after open heart surgery at Shotley Bridge Hospital, near Consett, County Durham.

His mother, Mary Pearson, 54, a care centre cook from Sunderland, found out recently that the hospital removed some of her son's organs without her consent.

She applied for an exhumation order so a pathologist could determine what exactly was buried all those years ago.

The brief examination took place early yesterday, followed by a funeral service in the Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church, Springwell Road, Sunderland.

After the service, attended by the Pearson family, including Simon's identical twin, Neal, 30 and sisters, Michelle, 35, Dawn, 32 and Nicola, 31, a gleaming white coffin was placed in the hearse for the short trip back to Castletown Cemetery, where Simon's remains were re-interred.

Mrs Pearson started making enquiries after the scandal of baby organ retention at Alder Hey Hospital, in Liverpool.

"After his death, I never got to see him," she said. "When all this came up about Alder Hey, I started to wonder about Simon. I contacted Shotley Bridge for a death certificate and when I got it, it said Simon had a full post-mortem without consent.

"In the post-mortem, it said they took everything from the brain to the prostate gland without consent.

"When I buried Simon I thought we were burying all of him and now I find out it was not all of him.

"It would not have been too bad if the hospital had told us what was going on but not to tell us is terrible. I just want to get his organs back and want him to be at rest."

The results of the pathology tests are expected next week.

A spokesman for County Durham and Darlington Acute Hospitals NHS Trust said in a statement: "To the best of our knowledge, procedures at the time were adhered to. Those procedures would have involved organs being put back in the body or disposed of in the way that was the norm at the time and that was by incineration."