Service Corporation International

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Please see the SCI article for other uses of the term SCI.

Service Corporation International or SCI is a corporation based in Houston, Texas which is the largest provider of funeral, cremation, and cemetery services in the United States, and one of the largest chains of funeral homes in the world with over 1200 funeral homes, 358 cemeteries, and revenues of $1.7 billion dollars. It operates in 48 states, eight Canadian provinces and Puerto Rico and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

In contrast to many other large corporations, SCI tries to keep an extremely low profile. Typically, a funeral home that is owned by SCI will not contain advertisements or logos for the corporation, with the exception, perhaps, of pins on staff lapels, and the corporation does not actively publicize its relationship to its funeral homes and cememteries. In many cases, SCI will buy a pre-existing funeral home with a long history and keep the name, the family history, and retain many existing employees and former owners.

This is largely because grieving families would much rather deal with what appears to be a small mom and pop funeral home than a large corporation. Because of this arrangement, most customers of SCI do not even know that they are dealing with this corporation.

In keeping with this philosophy, in 1999, SCI created Dignity Memorial, the first national brand of funeral services and products (including cremations and cemetery services and products). Thus, while SCI remains the owner and operator of facilities nationwide, Dignity Memorial is now the corporation's brand which is more visible to the public in terms of advertising and placement of logos on participating funeral homes, cemetery sites and products.

In recent years, SCI has liquidated most of its overseas assets. The profitability of funerals outside of America was not as large as estimated and different cultural and economic factors, even in other Western nations were not taken properly into account. For example in Australia cremation is the norm (60% of services overall, with a higher rate in urban areas) and the cost of a full funeral service there is often less than that of a casket purchased by a similar family in the United States.

SCI was awarded a no-bid contract by the State of Louisiana to count and collect corpses in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

[edit] Scandal

In the late 1990's, SCI was involved in a scandal in which the remains of a number of people were desecrated in a cemetery that the company owned. The cemetery was found to have been "recycling" graves - removing the remains of previous burials and placing other people in the graves.

The scandal took on an extra political dimension - company chairman Robert Waltrip was a friend of former US President George H.W. Bush's family. He had made a number of campaign contributions to the Bush family over the years.

The scandal, often called "funeralgate," grew even further when Eliza May - a director with the Texas Funeral Service Commission - was fired while investigating SCI. She alleged in a lawsuit that she was fired because she refused to halt the investigation despite pressure from then Governor George W. Bush to halt the investigation into SCI's practices. However other members of the commission indicated that she was fired because others in the office had lost confidence in her, and that she was using her authority in an inappropriate manner.

May's lawyers tried to compel Bush to testify at the trial, but Texas Judge John K. Dietz threw out the subpoena that would have required Bush to give a deposition. Bush opponents claimed that this decision was politically motivated due to him campaigning at the time for the Republican party's nomination for President. Bush supporters claimed that the judge was correct to throw out the subpoena - that the suit was a partisan attempt to damage his chances of receiving the party's nomination for President. May's lawsuit was settled in November of 2001 for $210,000. SCI paid $55,000 and the state paid the balance.

Weeks later, the revelation in the media that two Florida cemeteries owned by SCI were recycling graves, removing remains from their places of rest and placing other people in the graves. 9,000 people have staked a claim to a $100,000,000 settlement in a lawsuit stemming from the desecration of graves at these cemeteries. In one instance at Menorah Gardens, a Jewish cemetery, SCI desecrated graves and left corpses in the woods where they were devoured by wild hogs.

The general manager of Menorah Gardens, Peter Hartman, died by apparent suicide on December 27, 2001.[1]

The Texas Funeral Service Commission reluctantly agreed to pay $50,000 as part of the settlement to end the two year-old case. [2] Its then-chairman, Harry Whittington, became famous in February 2006 when he was shot in the face by Vice President Dick Cheney in a hunting accident.