A 68-year-old West Ashley woman who died at her home earlier this year while estranged from her family has joined a growing list of 119 people whose unclaimed cremated remains are in the custody of the Charleston County Coroner’s Office.
Each year, about 10 people are added to the list of people whose cremated remains or “cremains” have not been given to a relative or friend for burial, Charleston County Coroner Bobbi Jo O’Neal said.
The coroner’s office also has the remains of 34 people whose identities are not known, she said.
Twenty-two of the unclaimed cremains of those who are identified were buried, beginning in 2005, in the Mary Ann Point Indigent Cemetery, the county’s potter’s field on Johns Island, O’Neal said.
The other cremains, including those of the 68-year-old woman, whose name was withheld, are in the coroner’s office on Salt Pointe Parkway in North Charleston. O’Neal said she has no plans to bury the unclaimed cremains in the potter’s field.
Instead, the coroner’s office plans to transfer those cremains to a vault in Memorial Gardens in Mount Pleasant. “Our hope is to have a ceremony and move them to the vault” where they can be easily given to a family member in the future, she explained.
Natural causes claimed the lives of most of the identified people, and most of them are men, aged 40 to 60, she said.
Identified but unclaimed
The coroner’s office holds the cremains for a variety of reasons, she said.
In some cases, an individual has no living immediate relative or none can be located, O’Neal said. “Then there are times when the descendent is estranged from their family and (the family) doesn’t want to participate” with the cremains, she said.
Other cremains go unclaimed because family members are emotionally or financially unable or don’t want to decide what to do, she said.
When relatives are undecided, the coroner’s office attempts to help them decide or find resources through a church to pay for a funeral, but sometimes those efforts fail, she said. When that happens, the individual is cremated “because we don’t have the storage capacity to maintain individuals for a long period of time,” she said.
The coroner can hold remains for 30 days while waiting for a family or friend to make funeral arrangements. Beyond that time, the coroner’s office then seeks Charleston County Probate Court authority to cremate the remains, O’Neal said.
The Veterans Administration has assisted in the burial of cremains of 37 military veterans in the national cemeteries in Beaufort, Florence and at Fort Jackson in Columbia, she said.
A bill is pending in the S.C. Legislature that would give coroners around the state the authority without probate court approval to cremate unclaimed remains 30 days after an individual’s death. The bill, H. 4188, recently passed the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, said O’Neal, who testified before the subcommittee.
34 unidentified people
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) has 34 files on people whose full or partial skeletal remains were found in Charleston County, O’Neal said.
Law enforcement agencies and coroners and medical examiners around the country submit information into the system with the hope that it leads to an identity match, she said. After collecting forensic data of an unidentified person their cremains are also stored in the coroner’s office.
One of them includes a possibly an undocumented man between 18 to 30 years old who was found Jan. 14, 2006, in a minivan at a rest area alongside I-26. The man is believed to have been deceased for a few hours before he was found. He had dark brown hair and brown eyes, stood about 5 feet 1 inch tall, and weighed 117 pounds.
“These individuals are somebody, and they had somebody who loved them,” O’Neal said. “We may not know who they are, but somebody knows them. The way a society takes care of its dead speaks volumes about that society.”
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