Remains of fetuses found in Detroit funeral home
The remains of 63 infants or fetuses were found at a funeral home in Detroit on Friday, the Detroit Police Department said.
The discovery came amid an expanding investigation, one week after officials found the decomposed remains of 11 infants or fetuses at another — apparently unrelated — funeral home in Detroit. The discoveries have raised concerns about the handling and disposal of human remains by the city’s funeral homes, especially in cases of stillbirth.
On Friday, the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs found “heinous conditions and negligent conduct” at the Perry Funeral Home. State officials said Saturday they had removed 37 remains from boxes and 26 from a freezer. Some of the human remains there were found to be years old.
In an emailed statement, the department said the Perry Funeral Home may have committed criminal violations by failing to properly dispose of bodies or to facilitate their final dispositions, such as burial or cremation, in accordance with state laws. The business was shuttered Friday and its license was suspended.
The discovery was prompted in part by a lawsuit filed in July by a woman whose daughter, Alayah Laniece Davis, died shortly after she was born in a hospital in December 2014. At the time, the mother said the body should be given to Wayne State University Medical School for
research or educational purposes, the lawsuit said.
Instead, the remains ended up in the custody of Perry Funeral Home and may have been stored at the Wayne State University School of Mortuary Science for years without the mother’s knowledge, according to the lawsuit, which also named the university and the hospital where the baby was born as defendants.
The lawsuit said the funeral home indicated, on a certificate of death, that the infant’s remains had been buried in a cemetery, even though they remained at the mortuary. All of this happened over a period of years without the mother’s knowledge, the lawsuit added.
“We’ve got multiple layers of potentially criminal activity by Perry Funeral Home, lack of supervision on the part of the mortuary science program and gross negligence on the part of the hospital,” said Peter J. Parks, a lawyer for the mother.
Joshua I. Arnkoff, a lawyer representing the Perry Funeral Home, said in an email Friday that he could not comment “other than to say that the allegations in the lawsuit are disputed.”
In an emailed statement, Wayne State University said it had become aware of the lawsuit only recently. “Without offering an opinion on the lawsuit itself, we believe the claim against the university is baseless and we will be moving soon to dismiss it,” it added.
A spokeswoman for the Detroit Medical Center, where Alayah was born, could not immediately be reached for comment Friday but told The
Detroit News that it was against its policy to discuss pending litigation.
On Oct. 12, news broke that infants’ remains had been found hidden in the ceiling of another funeral home — the Cantrell Funeral Home, which had been shuttered in April. The news reached Alayah’s family, which encouraged Parks to share their concerns about Perry Funeral Home with the police, which he did.
In a news conference Friday, Chief James Craig of the Detroit Police Department said the two funeral homes did not appear to be connected, and that officials may form a task force to investigate how human remains are stored and documented in the area. “This is larger than we might know,” he said.
Daniel W. Cieslak, another lawyer representing Alayah’s mother, said Friday that based on documents he had seen while investigating this case, there could be hundreds of fetuses’ remains in the custody of Perry Funeral Home.
“I’m glad they recovered that many,” he said after investigators found dozens of them Friday. “But it seems to me that there could be more.” Cieslak and Parks hope to turn the mother’s complaint into a class-action lawsuit.
Craig called the situation “very, very disturbing” and said state officials could be called upon to help with a wider investigation.
“There’s a lot that has happened in the last 24 hours,” Cieslak said, adding that he was glad officials had investigated the Perry Funeral Home. “But it’s raising more questions for me now.”