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‘Horrific’: 189 bodies found and removed from Colorado ‘green’ funeral home

www.theguardian.com ‘Horrific’: 189 bodies found and removed from Colorado ‘green’ funeral home

Authorities find more bodies after initial report of 115 two weeks ago, when owners were evicted and police investigated foul odor

The remains of at least 189 decaying bodies were found and removed from a Colorado funeral home, up from about 115 reported when the bodies were discovered two weeks ago, officials said Tuesday.

The remains were found by authorities responding to a report of a foul odor at the Return to Nature funeral home inside a decrepit building in the small town of Penrose, Colorado.

Efforts to identify the remains began last week with help from an FBI team that gets deployed to mass casualty events like airline crashes. Fremont sheriff Allen Cooper described the scene as “horrific”.

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116 comments

Funeral homes are parasites. Families should prepare and bury their own, unembalmed with no casket. A dead body is the most biodegradable matter in nature. Why pump it full of formalin and doll it up like a tart? Mourn the life of the dead, not their physical body.
- Have you seen the people of walmart? Do you want them to be burying their dead near river banks and protected water ways? Fuck no.
  
  This is the answer. It's a pollution issue as much as a mortician issue.
  
  There is this clothing donation dumpster thing by my work that has a couch infront of it. It's pretty clear to me what happened. Someone brought it, noticed the sign that says no furniture donations, and decided that it wasn't his problem.
  
  It would be pretty much like that. Find random bodies everywhere.
  
  Or just plain old burying a person too shallow. Not a huge problem now, but it'll be a problem when coyotes and vultures and other scavengers dig the corpse up.
- Preparing and burying your own is a recipe for cholera outbreak
  
  Easy fix: don't bury people, just leave the bodies out in the open so scavengers can do their job.
  
  Cholera more requires the living and untreated water. Palestine is a recipe for a cholera outbreak. You'd need some spread among the living before the corpses become a real vector.
  
  E coli maybe, but once again, only with untreated water.
  
  For the most part, corpses don't really spread a lot of disease other than whatever killed them.
  
  Cultures around the world that actually buries their dead without caskets aren't dropping dead en masse. It's almost like modern water treatment system disinfects water they take from the rivers, which is full of animal carcass and poo by the way.
- It's illegal almost everywhere in the US to have a "natural" burial. There are laws on containers, treatment, and where the deceased can be buried. Dead bodies, while very biodegradable are also toxic and tend to get dug up and parts drug around by animals, up rooted by trees, or dug up during construction after the property is bought out. I do agree that funeral homes are soulless vultures who fleece people in mourning though, the last "fuck you" from capitalism.
  
  I've looked it up years ago. In my state, you don't need embalmed, a vault, or anything really. You can throw a fresh body into the ground in a handmade pine box if you want.
  
  I think the only restriction is an approved site for burial.
  
  What constitutes a natural burial? At a cursory glance there are only about 5 states that don’t permit home burials and many of those just say it has to be in a cemetery, but you can apply for a family cemetery on your property and it’s completely legal.
  
  In Virginia and West Virginia at least there are no requirements whatsoever that you use a casket or bury them to any specific depth. I’d suspect that if you were disrespecting grandma and threw her in the garbage you would be breaking desecration of remains laws but doing a legitimate burial at home is completely fine.
  
  I can only speak to the laws of my state and those around me, and I suppose local municipalities might have differing laws, but it’s pretty open ended. You do not need a funeral home involved at all and frankly given how expensive these things are I totally support families that go that route.
  
  Are you sure natural burial is illegal?
  
  Little of this is true. You can buy a wood casket, embalming is optional. Where you bury yes is regulated but maybe the rest of us don't want to drink corpse water.
- Are you out of your mind?
- Permanently Deleted
- Fun fact. It’s completely legal and ok to take possession of your loved one, provided you are their legal next of kin, and you can effectively bury them yourselves. Find someone on Craigslist that can throw together a pine box and rent out an excavator for a weekend and you can bury grandma for a fraction of the cost.
  
  I have loaded a corpse into the bed of a pickup truck. We have sat bodies upright in the back of a suburban. All of this is completely legal so long as you don’t cross state lines and even then you just need a permit.
  
  Each state handles it differently but largely this is the same wherever you go.
  
  Spend the 5k to 10k on a nice trip to Vegas, Grammy would have wanted it that way.
  
  Is it legal to have a Viking funeral where you're set adrift in a longboat and someone fires a flaming arrow at it and it goes down on fire? Asking for a friend.
  
  You can also just not claim grandma’s body and let your tax dollars handle it at an even bigger bargain.
  
  “Everywhere you go” inside this one count you’re talking about. Maybe.
- What happens if you don't own land?
  
  Wait..You... You are saying to only bury your dead on your own land, right?
  
  Padme_meme.jpg
  
  If you don't own land then you're not a real citizen /s
- It turns out that humans and their pets are horrible for the environment because we’re just filled with chemicals from medication, cosmetics, and food. We’re not living our natural best anymore.
- It's actually illegal in most countries to bury a dead body without alerting your authorities and usually there are restrictions on where you can do it.
  
  You can of course just cremate the body, you don't have to go with a cemetery.
- Embalming is optional and always has been. You can purchase biodegradable caskets and again that was always been an option. Open caskets are by family request and often aren't even an option.
  
  I also saw Adam Ruins everything.
- Isn't that illegally?
Wtf is this thread. There's a comment chain going wild about how to bury your own body.

Is there a Lemmy bestOf?
- When you have a loved one pass away... and you get forced to pony up $10k for a basic service, cremation in a nice casket, and a pretty expensive "basic" urn for the ashes, because the funeral home won't let you use anything cheaper like a pine box or a shroud, with the only choice being between an "eco gas" cremation in your own city vs. a $2k cheaper "non eco" one a city over... you'll understand why people call funeral homes parasites and look for alternatives.
  
  Just put me in a Folgers can. Just because we're bereaved doesn't make us saps!
  
  I just had to do this. It was less than $4K for cremation, two services with funeral home staff (multi-hour, including on location at the church), and all of the guest books/cards/etc, plus announcements. I'd have to look at my paperwork for the exact amount.
  
  They even told us to bring our own urn because it would be cheaper than anything the funeral home could provide, so we did.
  
  You can use a pinewood casket.
  
  Refuse to accept the body. The local government will have to take care of it.
- You're seeing that in-between moment when a wildly ignorant comment is upvoted to the top quickly but comes down slowly. It's still hot, but the OP has been downvotes far below most corrective comments.
- It's a good chain. I want to be tossed in the ocean (when I'm dead).
- Lemmites thinking anyone who provides a service is a parasitic bourgeois bastard that needs guillotining.
  
  As with any service, everything can be "reasonably" priced. Things that people need every day have become predatory or straight price gouging. Funeral homes are one of those. If people want to have their naked bodies burned or put into the ground, they should be able to.
In theory... Let's say I bury my loved one far away from the city. Couple months later some hiker finds an arm that an animal pulled out. Police gets involved. They blame it on the cartels... At what point do I say anything, and if I do, how much trouble am I in?
- “Asking for a friend”
  
  Of course. It goes without saying.
- It depends on your jurisdiction, it's a felony in some places.
Nobody wants to talk about the fact that this is very clearly a former Pizza Hut?
- F
A funeral home contains dead bodies? THE HORROR!
- Well they're normally not rotting
  
  Typically the front doesn't fall off.
When does the US get labelled as third world hellhole it actually is?

Absolutely fucking disgusting.
- It’s one funeral home. The US certainly has its problem, but you should relax a bit.
  
  This is the only nursing home with piles of corpses isn't quite the argument in favour of your country not being a shit hole you think it is.
  
  Just ignore the rampant school shootings, the racially motivated violence of police against citizens not breaking any laws and the wannabe autocratic dictator who incited a mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power that your justice system seems terrified of holding accountable.
  
  If we ignore all of these "just one thing" issues then everything is fine.
- That would require the US to leave NATO and become Switzerland tier neutral.
  
  Oh, you meant the racist way people who've never been to the "third world" say "third world."
  
  Iean unaligned with allied or axis powers?
- Lmfao, the rage!
- Lol what a moron.
  
  The dude is so dumb he doesn't even know that Donald Trump made America great again.

116 comments