■ Funeral home horrors put the spotlight on spotty U.S. regulations.

Decomposing bodies shined spotlight on hit-and-miss regulation

DETROIT — The stench of decomposing flesh pulsed from a funeral home into a Michigan neighborhood as maggots wriggled along the garage floor near cardboard-boxed corpses stacked along walls.

The dead can’t complain, but on occasion — through rot — they scream for judgment against the living entrusted with prompt and solemn cremation or burial. Of 10 bodies found in the unrefrigerated garage at Swanson Funeral Home in Flint last year, one was not embalmed and had been there about six weeks. The Michigan attorney general filed complaints against the business, but it remained open until July — after inspectors again found bodies in the unrefrigerated garage.

The Flint business is one of several funeral homes in the U.S. in recent years that have been forced to close after similarly gruesome discoveries, usually only after someone has complained to local authorities. Funeral home regulations vary across the U.S., with some states requiring annual inspections and several requiring no inspections at all. Michigan is among those that review funeral homes when they apply for a license or when a complaint is filed.

“I think better state oversight is certainly the solution,” but “it’s really going to be a budget thing,” said Scott Gilligan, general counsel of the National Funeral Directors Association. “Most states are struggling with budgets. It costs more money to hire inspectors and hire better enforcement.”

The Flint funeral home had been fined several times and faced multiple complaints before Michigan’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs suspended licenses of the business and its manager, O’Neil Swanson II. The move followed an unannounced inspection in May that was spurred by news reports that staff had mixed up two bodies.

Before that, Michigan’s attorney general had filed gross negligence, incompetence and other complaints in September 2016 after the 10 bodies were found in the garage. And in 2015, an outside funeral director complained to the state about problems that included the smell of decomposition and blood and fluids on the floor of a basement prep room, according to Licensing and Regulatory Affairs documents.

But Robert Duffer says inspectors would have found something amiss even before then if they had looked into a complaint from his family after the 2012 death of his wife. Duffer’s family believes they were given ashes belonging to someone else.

“The place was filthy,” Duffer, 77, told The Associated Press. “It was like an ancient room that’d never been cleaned.”