Trend hasn’t been mirrored in Lorain County

New York is the only city in the U.S. to trump Cleveland in the amount of unidentified bodies, according to a study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
However, the study does less to tarnish Cleveland’s image than it does to highlight the city’s superior record-keeping practices. Cleveland’s unidentified remains records date back as early as 1900, while New York’s earliest case goes back to 1996. 
According to the study, coroners and medical examiners in five cities hold more than half of the nation’s 14,000 unidentified bodies. Cleveland took second place.
Steve Smith, a spokesman for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the study is the first to track death records on a national scale. Smith said it took more than a year for the bureau to collect records from nearly 2,000 coroners and medical examiners’ offices.
“Hopefully this will lead to us being able to provide some kind of closure for families who have been searching for missing
relatives,” Smith said. “We can improve the way records are kept.”
In Lorain County, unidentified remains are rarely the problem. Complications arise here when bodies go unclaimed, either because no next of kin can be located or families want nothing to do with the cost of burial.
Josh Slocum, executive director for the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a national funeral industry watchdog group based in Vermont, said that even the most basic service, cremation, can run between $500 and $1,000. The cost of a traditional funeral service can easily exceed $7,000, Slocum said.
Although no specific countywide statistics are kept concerning the number of unclaimed bodies in the area, Lorain County Coroner Paul Matus estimates his office receives one case every week where a body goes unclaimed or the next of kin simply turn their backs on the responsibility.
“Sometimes, we get two or three of these cases in a week,” Matus said. “It’s frustrating for everyone involved.”
Matus said the coroner’s office will do everything possible to find a relative. They contact social service workers, veterans’ organizations, funeral homes and even search the residence and mailboxes of the deceased.
“There’s a state law that says the city will pick up the cost of a funeral,” Matus said. “But it can take days to go through the red tape.”  
Richard Dakters, funeral director for Dicken Funeral Home in Elyria, said most funeral homes will absorb the cost of burials for unclaimed or unwanted bodies. The first step, he said, is attempting to locate any friends or family members. If that doesn’t turn up any results, the body is labeled as indigent and a request for a burial plot is filed with the city, Dakters said.
 The funeral home provides a “modest” casket, and the city provides the plot. The person is then buried in an unmarked grave with no minister or funeral service.
“We don’t cremate the bodies,” Dakters said. “Family may turn up later and say that they are against cremation.”
Often, the unidentified individuals lived under the radar. Some were drug addicts. Others were homeless.
Even when family can be tracked down, they want nothing to do with the estranged family member and even less to do with assuming the cost of a funeral service, Matus said.
One prominent case came in June 1999 when the grandson of American cowboy Will Rogers was found dead in a boarding house near the steel mill in Lorain, Matus said.
Carlos Rogers used an alias and seldom talked about his relationship to the iconic entertainer. Matus said Rogers had been drinking and coughing up blood. His body was cremated and sent to family in Arizona, Matus said.
Matus said Rogers had an estimated $500,000 in assets when he died.
Another incident that Matus recalled was when Victor Freedman crashed his Honda scooter into a car near Oberlin and died. No family ever turned up for him, even though people recognized him from being around town.
   “People would see him lurking around town, but nobody knew who he was or where he came from,” Matus said. “We found a birth certificate and prison records.”
   But no family was found, so Matus said he personally signed for the body to be cremated. The city of Oberlin picked up the cost of Freedman’s $800 burial, Matus said.
Contact Ben Norris at 329-7119 or bnorris@chroniclet.com.

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