Few human remains from Detroit funeral home have been claimed

DETROIT—The cremated remains of about 269 people abandoned at Cantrell Funeral Home in Detroit, some for two decades, are expected to be interred at metro Detroit cemeteries as early as All Souls’ Day.

All Souls’ Day, on Nov. 2, is a day to pray for loved ones who have died.

And to help families that may be looking for remains, a Grosse Pointe Park funeral home has set up a hotline.

The remains have been stored in a Flint facility operated by Preferred Removal Services, a mortuary transport company, since April when Cantrell was shut down by the state for violations.

“It’s sad,” said Tom Boaz, the owner of Preferred Removal, who was paid by the state to remove the remains and to store them. “I’m still a firm believer that even though they are ashes, they are still somebody’s mother, father, brother, sister.”

But Boaz said very few of the remains have been retrieved. His staff, he said, delivered one man’s remains to a Detroit mother who said she wanted them, but had difficulty getting

all the way out to Flint.

Next week, the remains are expected to be moved to Verheyden Funeral Homes in Grosse Pointe Park, which has offered to make funeral arrangements for them.

The move, Verheyden owner Brian Joseph said, will make it easier for families to retrieve remains and eventually inter them, most likely at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Detroit, and, for military veterans, at Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly, potentially on Veterans Day.

“We are trying to reach out to all the families to have a committal prayer from a variety of religious figures in our community,” Joseph said. “For the veterans, we want to have them receive military honors for their sacrifice for the country.”

So far, Joseph said, he has received hundreds of calls from concerned relatives.

Boaz said leaving cremated remains behind does not carry the legal penalties that leaving a dead body to decompose does. What could have happened, he speculated, is that Cantrell customers may not have retrieved the remains or were not contacted by the funeral home.

“Over the years, they collected,” he said. “That’s probably how there got to be so many.”

Most of the remains, Boaz said, weighed a few pounds, more or less depending on the size of the body, and were in standard black or brown mortuary boxes of varying sizes. They also appear to have been in places that were not readily visible.

State officials confirmed Thursday that 269 containers of cremated remains were found in Cantrell’s basement. Of those remains, 52 were unidentifiable because there were no records with them, and at least four were eventually retrieved by families.

Names for remains that have been identified have not been released publicly.

But some of the cremations appear to go back as far as 1996.

Questions about the remains have been renewed since last Friday, when 11 fetuses were found hidden in the ceiling of the former funeral home. A letter to investigators gave explicit instructions about where to locate them. The bodies were found inside a cardboard box and a white, infant-sized casket.