Officials Can’t ID Crematory Ashes

By Associated Press

April 20, 2005—SEABROOOK - Ashes in four urns seized at an unregistered crematorium in February will probably never be identified, a prosecutor said.

They were among 12 urns seized during a raid at the Bayview Crematorium in which police also allegedly found a decomposing body in a broken cooler and two sets of remains being cremated in one oven. A criminal investigation is continuing, but no charges have been filed.

"We’re going to end up with four urns we cannot identify," Rockingham County Attorney Jim Reams told The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass. "The troopers have gone through all the paperwork, and they don’t think they’ll ever be able to identify them. So we will likely petition the court to bury them."

Investigators don’t know whether the ashes are from whole bodies or tissues the crematorium disposed of for hospitals.

Meanwhile, health officials plan to go through death records to try to verify identifications of ashes received by families from Bayview before it was closed down. That was a common question from many of about 225 families who called a state hotline after the raid.

Dr. William Kassler, the state medical director, said he hopes a task force he leads will be able give the public "a level of reassurance" that they received the right remains.

Kassler said families will soon receive a letter from the state informing them that many of the records he needs are impounded as part of the criminal investigation of Bayview.

Thousands of Massachusetts and New Hampshire residents were left to wonder when Reams said in February he could not be sure that families that used Bayview got the right ashes.

Bayview’s lawyer, Gerard LaFlamme Jr. of Haverhill, Mass., said owner Larry Stokes was not aware of any wrongdoing in the handling of bodies.

"As far as the day-to-day operations go, Larry Stokes is in Florida from the fall to early summer," LaFlamme said. "He is not there to monitor what goes on there. It’s premature to comment on all the hysteria about Bayview crematory."

Stokes has been cooperating and plans to meet with state police detectives when he returns from his winter home in Florida later this month, LaFlamme said.

"Mr. Stokes doesn’t have anything to hide," he said.

Kassler said trying to trace death records of people who died years ago may not be easy.

"After remains are cremated, there’s no DNA," Kassler said. "So what we’re doing is looking at paperwork and ID tags that may have gone along with the remains."

The paperwork consists mostly of cremation forms, copies of which are supposed to be filed with the town, the state medical examiner’s office and the crematorium.

A criminal investigation into two former medical examiners revealed that some certificates dating back to the early 1990s were missing from the medical examiner’s office. Police found an undisclosed number of them at the home of the state’s former chief forensic investigator, Kathrine Wieder, during a police raid of her Newburyport, Mass., home late last year, according to court records.

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