FOIA Records Requests Uncover New Details About South Chicago Chapel

You already knew the South Chicago Chapel story was bad. Now, thanks to a couple of Freedom of Information Act requests, you know exactly how bad — and how long the warning signs sat ignored before anyone acted.

First, documents obtained by NBC Chicago from the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation lay out what investigators found when they raided the South Deering funeral home earlier this August: bodies stored in a non-refrigerated room registering 88 degrees, maggots inside body bags, rodent infestation severe enough that rats scurried out in front of investigators, and an odor described in the filings as “overwhelming.” 

State regulators have since suspended director Johanna Morgan’s funeral director license. Her husband and business partner, Clark Morgan, couldn’t produce chain-of-custody paperwork for 30 of the 49 bodies identified at the time of the raid.

The second FOIA

A separate FOIA-driven investigation was reported by Block Club Chicago in partnership with the Illinois Answers Project and Capitol News Illinois. Records show that 10th Ward Ald. Peter Chico’s office flagged concerns about South Chicago Chapel nearly a year before the raid — filing two separate complaints within the same week last September, one over odor and one requesting a business-license check after learning the Morgans had also run Chicago Heights’ Heights Crematory, which the state had shut down in 2025 after finding 100 improperly stored bodies there.

The city’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection closed its review of that license inquiry within seven minutes, reporting back only that no license was required unless the business sold retail goods like caskets and flowers. Nobody ever referred the concern to IDFPR, the agency actually responsible for regulating funeral homes. 

Ald. Chico initially told the Chicago Sun-Times that the only complaints his office had fielded about the funeral home involved alleged “gang funerals” — a claim the FOIA records now complicate considerably. Chico has since acknowledged knowing about the Morgans’ history before the raid but says he can’t recall whether it came up at a community meeting his office organized back in March. The Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, for its part, notes it can’t investigate unlicensed retail sales without a formal complaint, which the alderman’s office never filed.