Welcome to the two-hundred-and-forty-second edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #242, 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!
Nine more identified
Remember last August’s horrific discovery of 24 unidentified bodies at Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, Colorado? At the time, the remains were in such states of decomposition that names could not be immediately matched to them; by October, only six had been identified. Last week, authorities announced that the total has risen to 18, thanks to forensic genetic genealogy and more than 2,000 tips and completed forms from concerned citizens. All of the identified individuals died between 2010 and 2012, and were thought to have been cremated.
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Lots of firsts
Earth Funeral’s newest natural organic reduction (NOR) facility made headlines last week for a couple of really exciting reasons. The Elkridge, Maryland location is the very first NOR facility on the East Coast AND at 37,000 square feet, it’s the largest NOR facility in the world. Maryland became the ninth state to legalize NOR in May 2024, and although the process is legal in several other East Coast states, including Maine, New Jersey, and Delaware, Maryland is the first to establish an in-state facility.
You get what you pay for (?)
A Los Angeles family called their local “on your side” news outlet for help when a small urn they ordered from Amazon arrived seemingly “prefilled.” According to KABC news, the family ordered several small urns from a third-party Amazon seller to fill with their grandfather’s cremains. One of the urns, though, was filled with a substance they described as “ashes,” but that doesn’t seem to have been confirmed by any deathcare authority. Even so, the family enlisted the news station to help them get the seller to investigate whose cremains might have been in the vessel, assuming that the family of that person returned the item to the company and the company resold the used urn as new.
