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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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Widow wins suit in cremation fraud |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Monday, 29 November 2004 |
Business illegally sold bodies to researchers
By Onell R. Soto
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
November 29, 2004
SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune
When Clemencia Hillyer's husband of 25 years died in 2001, she arranged for cremation, scattered the ashes into the ocean and moved forward with her life.
She had been at his bedside for months as he battled lung cancer and reluctantly assented to the Canadian navy veteran's wishes for a burial at sea.
But about a year later, she discovered that the ashes she spread may not have been those of her husband, Bill, whose body was among dozens cut up for sale by a Riverside County crematorium owner who ran an anatomical supply house on the side.
Clemencia Hillyer's son had to identify his stepfather by looking at a picture of a head found in a freezer. Other freezers held his knees and shoulders.
What became of the rest of him is unknown.
The crematorium owner, Michael Brown, pleaded guilty to mutilating 78 bodies without permission and was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison. Three other workers also pleaded guilty.
But Hillyer, 66, of Chula Vista, kept fighting, and last month a San Diego Superior Court jury awarded her and her family $450,000 in the first lawsuit over the fraud to go to trial.
Most of the other 10 civil suits against Brown and his businesses, Pacific Cremation Care and Bio-Tech Anatomical, have been settled for about half of what Hillyer won at trial, lawyers said. About half of the cases involve San Diego County families.
One more suit remains and is scheduled to go to trial next year. It is too late for other families to sue, lawyers say.
Investigators who raided the Lake Elsinore crematorium found parts of about 300 people, 50 of whom were part of a legitimate body donation program, said lawyer Michael Perez, who represented Hillyer.
"A lot of them were never identified," he said. Brown had a contract with Riverside County to cremate bodies of homeless people with no families.
He sold the parts he got from bodies he was supposed to cremate to universities and biotech companies for medical research and sent some bodies to an embalming school, Perez said.
It's impossible to say how many bodies were illegally dismembered before an employee alerted authorities to the crimes, he said.
"He had gotten away with it for three years," Perez said.
While her husband was terminally ill, Hillyer was uneasy with cremation.
"I would rather have had a funeral, a real funeral, but he wanted to have his ashes spread in the sea," she testified in a deposition.
So before her husband died Feb. 27, 2001, she contacted Humphrey Mortuary in Chula Vista and signed a contract for his cremation.
Humphrey is owned by Alderwoods Group, the second-largest funeral home operator in the country.
Seven San Diego County mortuaries owned by the company contracted with Brown's company for cremation, as did six independent funeral homes, Perez said.
Hillyer sued Humphrey and Alderwoods, and she agreed to settle the case for an undisclosed amount before trial.
Workers at Humphrey initially told Hillyer it would take about five days to have his body cremated and returned. It took 10.
When she got what she thought were all her husband's ashes, Hillyer wept as she and her children rented a boat and took them to a spot off Point Loma.
They threw flowers into the water and opened up the bag of ashes they had been given.
"It fell to the sea like that, like a bag of cement," she recalled recently. "I didn't like the color or anything about it."
It was difficult to say goodbye to the man she had met through a neighbor, who fell in love with her and proposed marriage after two years, accepting her three children as his own.
He was from Canada; she was born in Mexico. They made a life in the middle as he became a shipyard machinist in the wake of his naval career.
"The years I lived with him were the best years of my life," she said. "It was a quiet life, happy."
She remembered asking him if he ever had thought about getting tattoos, like so many of his colleagues during 20 years at sea.
"No, I respect my body very much," he told her.
About a year later, she was visiting her daughter, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. It was a detective from Riverside with questions about Bill's funeral arrangements.
Her daughter took the call and told her there might be a problem. Although she didn't fill her mother in on all the details, the news wasn't good.
That weekend, her son met the detective in Riverside County and looked at the pictures.
"The instant I saw it I recognized him," Jose Rodriguez testified in a deposition. "So I looked a little closer and it was real alarming," he said.
The memory has made it difficult to sleep, he said.
"I've thought about it pretty much . . . every day," he said.
As it became clear to Hillyer what happened, she became angrier and angrier.
Brown's guilty plea and sentence meant little.
"The fact that this man's in jail didn't help me," she said.
She decided to take her lawsuit to trial in hopes of telling her story to jurors.
"You can't put a price on this," she said. "It's not going to bring back my tranquillity."
"What a mockery of people's feelings," she said, remembering the tears she shed on that boat the day she thought she put her husband's remains to rest.
About two months ago, she finally got the ashes of her husband's remains that Riverside sheriff's deputies seized when they raided Brown's operation.
"I think, I think they returned his ashes," Hillyer said. "I'm not 100 percent sure."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20041129-9999-1m29brown.html |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Pale Death with impartial tread beats at the poor man's cottage door and at the palaces of kings.” Horace
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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