Division of Funeral Corp. Charged With Desecrating Corpses Hired to Collect Deceased Victims of Hurricane Katrina | BaltimoreChronicle.com

Division of Funeral Corp. Charged With Desecrating Corpses Hired to Collect Deceased Victims of Hurricane Katrina | BaltimoreChronicle.com:

A funeral services company that recently learned that one of its subsidiaries is negotiating a lucrative contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to remove dead bodies in areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina paid $100 million to settle a class-action lawsuit several years ago alleging the company desecrated thousands of corpses and dumped bodies into mass graves.

Moreover, the company, Service Corporation International (SCI), paid $200,000 to settle a whistleblower lawsuit that sought to expose that two members of the Texas funeral commission, the agency which regulates the funeral industry, were actually employees of the company they were supposed to monitor—an obvious conflict of interest.

In the civil matter, which took place at two Jewish cemeteries in Florida, the plaintiff's attorney said that SCI secretly broke into and opened burial vaults and dumped remains in a wooded area where they may have been consumed by wild animals.

Additionally, SCI was accused of burying 'remains in locations other than those purchased by plaintiffs; crushing burial vaults in order to make room for other vaults; burying remains on top of the other rather than side-by-side; secretly digging up and removing remains; secretly burying remains head-to-foot rather than side-by-side; secretly mixing body parts and remains from different individuals; secretly allowing plots owned by one party to be occupied by a different person; secretly selling plots in rows where there were more graves assigned than the rows could accommodate; secretly allowed graves to encroach on other plots; secretly sold plots so narrow that the plots could not accommodate standard burial vaults; secretly participated in the desecration of gravesites and markers and failed to exercise reasonable care in handling the plaintiff's loved one’s remains.'

Kenyon International, a unit of SCI, is presently in charge of the delicate task of collecting the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dead bodies in the aftermath of the hurricane. The fact that a subsidiary of SCI, largely due to its close ties to the White House, is in talks with the federal government to remove bodies in New Orleans, is ghastly.

The head of SCI is a close friend of the Bush family who contributed heavily to then Gov. Bush's gubernatorial campaigns.