Evi Shepard says it’s important to her that the remains of her brother, killed in a large trash compactor, be recovered for a proper burial.

That will not happen.

John Adams’ body was probably incinerated, along with the waste emptied from the compactor weeks ago.

Even though police inspected the trash, strewn out before them at the Covanta Niagara incinerator in Niagara Falls, they somehow missed Adams’ 5-foot, 7-inch, 145 pound frame.

“I don’t know why he wasn’t found,” said Niagara Falls police Capt. William Thomson. “There’s three days of garbage. They opened it up, they looked around. You fall into a compactor, you can only imagine what will happen.”

That was on July 7, three days after Adams first went missing. He had been working the night shift as a maintenance man at the One Niagara Welcome Center, near the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls.

He had not checked out for the night, nor had he returned to his residence on Seventh Street — heightening a mystery that lingered for weeks.

Surveillance videos checked almost three weeks later, on Friday, showed Adams, 67, dumping trash into the compactor, then dropping the can he had emptied.

He jumped into the dumpster to retrieve the can even though the compactor was running. He probably thought he could climb out in time, said Tony Farina, One Niagara president and a spokesman for owner Frank Parlato.

“It all happened very quickly,” said Farina, who has seen the video. “He was gone in a matter of two minutes.”

The compactor was hauled away and emptied three days later. Under police watch, the contents were examined.

Had they spotted Adams’ body, the mystery of his whereabouts would have been solved that day.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Shepard, his sister. “They told me they looked hard.”

Shepard called it very important to her that Adams’ body be found and buried.

“It would close a lot,” she said.

However, she said that police told her there is no chance of that.

“Where the dumpster goes, they burn everything,” she added.

She said she had urged police early on to check surveillance recordings from inside the building. But Thomson said officers were not aware until much later that video was available from the compactor area.

Meanwhile, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it will investigate the accident.