DEATH PENALTY

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2006 by Anderson, Rick

Small weekly newspaper's investigation unearths consumer complaints on funerals

With looks of wonder, the Otis family and the McNeal family met for the first time across their sons' grave. That's correct: Two sons, one grave.

Both were teenagers, both were victims of crime, and both, the stunned families had just learned, were buried in the same grave. The McNeal's son, Terrell, 19, of Tacoma, Wash., had been shot while visiting Los Angeles on Dec. 31, 2003. The Otises' son. Johnathan, 17, of suburban Seattle, was slain Jan. 3, 2004, in a local parking lot. Like their families, they had never met in life. But they were unexpectedly united in death when the cemetery quietly buried one atop the other four days apart.

The families might never have known, save for a startling coincidence: A friend of the Otises who attended young Johnathan's burial ceremony was also a friend of the McNeals and attended the burial of young Terrell. No name markers or headstones identified the grave at that point, but the friend, certain it was the same plot, alerted the families. Ultimately, the cemetery moved one body to another grave, paid a $6,500 legal claim, and therein settled a complaint the survivors had filed with the Washington state Funeral and Cemetery Office, alleging wrongful double burial.

I, too, along with my readers, might never have known of the double burial had it not been for that complaint, and stacks of others like it, that helped make death a lively topic for Seattle Weekly in May. A cover piece on funeral and burial ripoffs, "Six Feet Underhanded," and two sidebars, grew out of a public records request. My motivation was pure (if not morbid) curiosity about what types of complaints were being filed with a little-known state agency, the Funeral and Cemetery Office, which is managed in part by retired morticians. They somberly unloaded several thousand pages of files even though I'd narrowed my request by seeking copies only of the complaint and the findings in each case, not full investigations.

Seattle Weekly has a small staff and undertakes almost no computer-assisted research. I spent only a few weeks reporting and writing the stories. Yet, with the state reports and other details gleaned through interviews, court records and queries to state and national funeral associations and services, it wasn't difficult to quickly produce three pieces.

There were complaints about bodies buried in the wrong plots, cremated when they should have been buried, or occupying graves that had been resold to other bereaved families. Cheated or disappointed consumers had encountered misspelled headstones and the mishandling of their loved ones' remains, while others endured high-pressure sales pitches by the "death-care" industry's "grief counselors."

Horror stories

I had expected maybe a couple dozen complaints from my records request, but more than 60 arrived, covering a two-year period and ranging from small contract-language disputes to serious law-breaking. Washington state, which licenses 240 funeral homes, 149 cemeteries, 71 crematories, and 569 funeral directors, routinely pursues complaints as well as regulatory violations, some replete with horror stories.

An apprentice embalmer in Olympia was suspended for at least three years and fined $500 for repeatedly taking pictures of the deceased in a funeral home, including photographs showing "significant trauma and other sensitive details" such as a disinterred baby and a large autopsied woman. The embalmer also once took home a child's casket to play with.

There was also the impatient funeral director who told a mother she'd just have to wait to view her accident-victim son because the director was still sewing his foot back on.

Some funeral-home operators don't like to see a family show up with its own discount-priced coffin - a relatively new trend. That happened to the survivors of Wayne "Ace" Colley, a World War II Navy tail gunner and long-time Boeing worker. When he died at 83 from bone cancer, his family turned to Costco in their time of need.

Costco, the warehouse club that specializes in appliances, electronics and bulk food also successfully markets a lower-end line of caskets such as the "In God's Care" model, an 18-gauge steel container from Universal Casket, for $924.99, shipping and handling included. That's hundreds, even thousands of dollars less than some containers sold by funeral homes.

But once their discount coffin arrived at a Seattle mortuary, Colley family members discovered they were required to uncrate it themselves. They undertook the somber task in a room next to the crematory, where the roaring remains of others' dearly departed were being incinerated. After the uncrating, relatives had to haul away the packing materials. The family and an attorney for the casket-maker filed a state complaint, and the home has since discontinued its policy of requiring consumers to unwrap third-party caskets.

Fixing prices

The main story included a look at Service Corp. International, a multinational chain based in Texas. It is about to corner more than 15 percent of the U.S. market by buying the second-largest U.S. mortuary chain, the Alderwoods Group of Ohio. The $856 million deal will allow SCI - headed by Robert Waltrip, longtime friend and contributor to both President Bushes - to operate 2,202 funeral homes and cemeteries in North America.