Welcome to the two-hundred-and-thirty-third edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #233, 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!
52 names for 52 families
The exact number of immediate and eventual casualties of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima may never be known, but about 70,000 of that number are entombed in the city’s Peace Memorial Park — all unclaimed, and many unidentified. City officials are hoping to change that. They recently completed a survey of 813 urns in the hopes of finding hair or other items that could help them put a name to these remains. Thanks to these efforts, the hair of 52 victims will be undergoing DNA analysis — which means that 52 families may be reunited with their long lost loved ones.
Secure Online Identity Verification
When a family can’t come to your funeral home in person, online identification is sometimes the only option, — but emailing photos isn’t secure (and it’s repeat-viewable).
Secure View gives you a safer, documented way to confirm identity online:
- Upload the photo securely
- Send a password-protected link for a limited-time view
- The next of kin verifies themselves by uploading a government-issued ID
- You receive confirmation documentation for your records
If you want to see how it works (and how it helps safeguard your funeral home), watch the quick demo.
A powerful tribute
Families whose loved ones were victims of Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado gathered in Denver last weekend for a (literally and figuratively) moving tribute. Colorado Remembers, a nonprofit founded by the mother of a victim of the funeral home’s malpractice, arranged for the names and faces of the victims to be projected on the side of a distinctive downtown clock tower building. The timing of the presentation was intentional, as one of the owners of Return to Nature, Carie Hallford, was scheduled to appear in federal court the next day to receive her sentence after pleading guilty to wire fraud charges. Check out the video here:
Deathcare docket
In addition to the 18-year federal prison sentence and $1 million restitution order imposed last week on the Carie Hallford of the aforementioned Return to Nature Funeral Home tragedy, other folks in the industry were making headlines all across the U.S., as well, unfortunately:
- California: Montebello-based funeral home botched embalming, lawsuit says
- Arkansas: Funeral home director addresses compliance concerns after state hearing
- Nebraska: Lepler remains incompetent to stand trial in headstone fraud case
- West Virginia: West Virginia cemetery owner pleads guilty to wire fraud in grave marker scam, prosecutors say
- Michigan: Funeral director Terry Kaufman pleads no contest in embezzlement scheme
- Kansas: ‘Very distasteful’: Wichita mortuary closed after being found to prepare bodies at unlicensed establishment
But on a positive note …
Not every deathcare matter taking place in the governmental systems last week was negative; in fact, here are a couple of pieces of good news:
- Michigan’s Gov. Whitmer signed two bills that will expedite the medical certification and administrative portions of the death certificate process. The bills require certificates to be filed online within 48 hours and expands medical sign-offs to include qualified physicians rather than only county medical examiners.
- In New Hampshire, the “Live Free and Die Free Act,” which would legalize natural organic reduction, is expected to pass the House of Representatives and hopefully sail on through the Senate.
