Hair Art & Shocking Stickers | 4M #210
Welcome to the two-hundred-and-tenth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #210, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!
More felonies and misdemeanors for Johnson
It’s been one year since authorities serving an eviction notice to Chris Lee Johnson of Johnson Funeral & Cremation Services in southern Georgia found 18 decomposing bodies. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation marked that anniversary with 38 brand new felony and misdemeanor charges for Johnson, who remains in jail. These new counts include felony by theft, violation of vital records registration, misdemeanor theft by taking, felony theft by deception, misdemeanor theft by deception, and first-degree forgery.
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Museum in-hair-itance
A 3,000-piece collection of Victorian-era memorial hair art is being rehomed following the death of the collector, Leila Cohoon, a hairdresser in Independence, Missouri. Appropriately, the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston will take possession of 30 pieces from the collection, and hopefully other museums will step up to preserve these pieces, which Cohoon collected over a 30-year span. Cohoon’s granddaughter has said that the “process of rehoming has helped her grieve her grandmother’s death” an unintended but positive consequence of this tedious process.
Sticker shock
A traveler on the Indian airline IndiGo snapped and posted to X a photo of a human remains container on his flight that was tagged with an “extreme heavy” sticker. The post has gone viral not because of the weight designation, but because of the cartoonish image of an elephant that accompanied it. X user Hirav captioned the image: “Might sound silly but @IndiGo6E, for Human Remain cargo shipment. You might want to change the ‘Extreme Heavy’ sticker with an elephant on it. Just for the respect of the one who has departed.”
Mystery solved
A New Orleans couple — and eventually the archaeological community, as well — were perplexed when they found what turned out to be a 2,000-year-old gravestone of a Roman warrior in their backyard in March. With the help of a Tulane University professor, the origin of the slab was traced back to an ancient Roman cemetery that was discovered in the 1860s in Civitavecchia, Italy. It spent some time in a few museums before disappearing during World War II. Last week, a woman came forward and said she had placed the stone in the yard after inheriting it from her grandfather — a World War II veteran who was stationed in Italy. The New York Times says it’s “unclear” how he came into possession of the stone.
Costly decisions
The investigation into determining the identity of 24 bodies found in a coroner-owned mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado in August could cost more than $1 million, authorities said last week, adding that they’ve already run up expenses of $800,000. The identification of each body found in a storage area at Davis Mortuary, which was owned by former coroner Brian Cotter and his brother, costs about $10,000 — and only six have been positively identified to date.
