Body mistakenly taken from funeral home to landfill
Quote:
Body mistakenly taken from funeral home to landfill
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
CHRONICLE NEWS SERVICE
A body picked up by mistake with last week's garbage from a funeral home is lost in a landfill.
Holland Police said today they hope to talk to workers at Priority Arrowaste of Zeeland to narrow their search within Autumn Hills landfill in Zeeland Township. So far, a two-day search has turned up nothing.
"At this point, we don't have a crime," Holland Police Sgt. Keith Mulder said. "What we have is a mistake."
Arrowaste workers picked up the body Thursday from a garage at Notier-Ver Lee-Langeland Funeral Chapel in Holland, police said. On Friday, the funeral home discovered the body was missing.
Police refused to identify the body, that of a 66-year-old man who died recently in Allegan County. Funeral home officials said the family asked to remain anonymous.
"The family's been kept informed of what's been going on from the very beginning," said John G. Sterenberg, a funeral home co-owner.
Sterenberg said the funeral home uses the garage to store bodies about three months a year, when it is cold enough and the refrigeration unit is full. That happens two or three times a winter, he said.
The funeral home stores medical waste and other materials for recycling on the other side of the garage. The hauler from Arrowaste picked up the body with the day's recycling, funeral home officials said.
Funeral home officials said they stored the body in the locked garage, which is not heated, while they waited word from the family or the county about whether it would be buried or cremated.
They said they waited "an unusually long period of time" for the decision. "A long period to us would be more than two weeks," Sterenberg said.
The body was kept in a zipped body bag in a 6-by-2-foot white container designed for cremation, Sterenberg said. The container has a tray at the bottom and handles on the sides, he said. There also are labels for the man's name and the funeral home's name. In four-inch letters on the top is the word "HEAD," he said.
What do you say to the family:
"ummm....oops, sorry about your luck."
