Shaving Cream Flamethrowers & Cemetery Cell Service | 4M #244

Welcome to the two-hundred-and-forty-fourth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #244, 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!

Quite the tantrum

If you read the words “flamethrower” and “cremains” in the same headline, where would your mind take you? If you’re thinking “DIY cremation” (as I did), well, you’d be wrong, but the story is still quite disturbing. It seems a Pennsylvania man flew into a drunken rage, accusing his wife of cheating. Using pressurized cans of cooking spray and shaving cream as improvised flamethrowers, he then aimed the fire at all the things his wife loved, including their child and their cats. As his coup de grâce, he opened an urn containing his mother-in-law’s cremains, stabbed the inner bag, and spread the ashes across the house, dumping the majority into the kitchen sink. Thankfully, the wife and child were unharmed, and escaped to a neighbor’s house when the man “drunkenly fell asleep.”

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Great signals in the cemetery

Some Utah residents were up in arms about the potential of an 80-foot cell tower being constructed in their neighborhood, but they’ve come up with a compromise — they want the tower to go up in an adjoining cemetery. “Staff initially avoided recommending the cemetery out of respect for the dead, but locals said the city should focus more on its living residents,” reported the local NPR station. “‘I’m sure my parents won’t mind,’ commissioner Josh Knight said, to laughter from the room.”

Justice (?) took 23 years

In 2002, a group of Wisconsin Boy Scouts hiking through the woods at their camp found a human skull; 23 years later, thanks to the DNA Doe Project, the skull was identified as belonging to a 91-year-old woman whose family had been told she was cremated. Last week, the former funeral home worker who was responsible for dumping her body instead of following through with her cremation finally saw his day in court. After pleading guilty to a felony charge of hiding a corpse, the man was sentenced to 90 days in jail, four years of probation (during which he can’t work in deathcare), and restitution of $14,590. He will also be required to receive mental health services and maintain absolute sobriety.