Who do you agree with in this situation; the funeral home or cemetery?
A funeral home director is scrambling to find a cemetery that will bury a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, ignoring protesters gathered outside his business and saying everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of his or her death.
Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev died from bullet wounds to his torso and extremities and blunt trauma to his head and body, Peter Stefan, owner of Graham, Putnam, and Mahoney Funeral Parlor, said Friday as he read details of the death certificate.
Tsarnaev, 26, was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. ET on April 19, four days after the twin bombings that killed four and wounded more than 260 others. He was shot during a gunbattle with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown, then run over and dragged by his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, as he fled in a stolen car.
A family spokeswoman said Tsarnaev’s relatives have demanded his body undergo a second “independent” autopsy, CNN reported.
Stefan, the owner of the Worcester, Mass., funeral home where his body is being prepared for burial shared the certificate to reporters Friday, according to news reports.
Earlier, Stefan said everybody deserves a dignified burial service no matter the circumstances of their death and he is prepared for protests. He added that arrangements have yet to be worked out.
Protesters gathered and chanted, “USA,” outside the mortuary. One sign read, “He should not be buried on U.S. soil,” the Boston Herald reported.
Thursday night, protesters showed up outside a North Attleborough funeral home where Tsarnaev’s body was taken after its release by the state medical examiner. The body was later transferred to Stefan, who is familiar with Muslim burial rites.
“I’m not honoring a terrorist. I’m just burying a body,” he told the Worcester Telegram.
An uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Maryland, arrived Thursday to work with Stefan on the arrangements.
An attorney for Tsarnaev’s widow, Katherine Russell, issued a statement earlier this week saying she would relinquish to his family her rights to his remains. Tsarni and Tamerlan’s two sisters then obtained Tsarnaev’s remains, The Boston Globereported.
(Photo: Chris Christo, AP)
