Tri-State Crematory
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The Tri-State Crematory was the subject of a national incident in the United States in the early 2000s leading to litigation and criminal prosecution, in which over three hundred bodies that had been consigned to a crematorium for proper disposal were never cremated but instead were dumped on the crematorium's site.
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[edit] Background
The crematorium was founded by Ray Marsh in the mid-1970s and was located in the Noble community in northwest Georgia, north of the city of LaFayette. It had for many years provided cremation services for a number of funeral homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Many funeral homes did not have their own cremation facilities and transferred the deceased to Tri-State for cremation.
Ray Marsh's health deteriorated in the mid-1990s to the point of being bedridden most of the time. At that point his son, Ray Brent Marsh, took over operation of the business.
[edit] Discovery and identification of the remains
In early 2002 the Environmental Protection Agency office in Atlanta received an anonymous tip that something was amiss at Tri-State. It sent officers to investigate the property, who discovered a skull and some bones that were human in origin. On February 15, 2002, investigators stumbled onto a grisly scene: piles of rotting human bodies were discovered in a storage shed, in vaults, and throughout the property. Investigators originally believed that the remains were as old as fifteen years, but testing revealed they had been on the site for only a few years, since the late 1990s.
A federal disaster team was brought into the area, along with a portable morgue shipped from Maryland. The team undertook to identify the remains, a process made difficult since many of the corpses were in advanced stages of decomposition, and some were little more than skeletons. Eventually 334 bodies were discovered, of which about 200 were identified. DNA testing was available for those cases where a living relative was available, but in other cases it was unlikely officials would ever be able to make identifications.
[edit] Failure to cremate
It turned out that sometime after Ray Brent Marsh took over the business, he simply stopped performing cremations. He instead disposed of the bodies by burying them, placing them in the storage shed, or simply dumping them in the woods behind the crematory buildings. He would often return what appeared to be ashes to the families, but later investigation revealed these to be concrete dust or wood chips. In response to Marsh's claim that the cremation oven was broken, the oven was tested and found to be in working order. Several crematory operators at the time commented that even if the machine had broken down, proper maintenance would have kept the incinerator working, noting that most oven manufacturers have regular maintenance programs available. They further opined that even had the machinery suddenly broken down it was still incumbent upon Marsh to make arrangements for immediate repairs.
[edit] Criminal prosecution
Ray Brent Marsh was arrested on over 300 felony charges, eventually being charged by the State of Georgia on 787 criminal counts, including theft by deception, abusing a corpse, burial service related fraud and giving false statements. Marsh was facing a sentence of more than eight thousand years. Marsh was represented by attorney McCracken Poston, who years before was the lawyer for Alvin "The Zenith Man" Ridley from nearby Ringgold, Georgia and Ron Cordova of Newport Beach, California. Cordova was a former Orange County, California prosecutor and like Poston, had served in the state legislature. The lawyers first teamed up two years earlier in the trial of Byron Looper for the murder of a Tennessee state senator. The criminal cases were settled after the Georgia Supreme Court had certified for review the defense question of whether or not a human corpse had any pecuniary value, an issue vital to the case in order to determine if the thefts could be criminally prosecuted. Marsh pled guilty and is serving a twelve year sentence, with credit for the time he had served before making bond.
[edit] Litigation
Almost seventeen hundred members of the families of the identified corpses sued Tri-State and the funeral homes that had shipped the bodies there, and were eventually granted class-action status. The funeral homes as well sued Tri-State and Marsh, eventually settling first for $36 million. Then in August 2004, the families settled with the Marsh family's insurer for $80 million, subject to the court's pending determination that the incident was actually covered by the family's homeowner's policy. Much of the earlier settlement with the funeral homes has been paid, through a deal in which the property of the Marsh family was sold. Those assets, however, were far too small to pay all the claims from both settlements, and full collection of the $80 million settlement by the families remains highly questionable.
[edit] Motives, and aftermath
The motives behind Marsh's actions were unclear, as it would have been far less trouble to simply cremate the remains than to dump them, and his statement in court when pleading guilty did nothing to clarify: "To those of you who may have come here today looking for answers, I cannot give you," he told the families. Attorneys for the families have said the families would like all the crematory buildings destroyed and the property returned to a natural, park-like state as a way of permanently honoring the victims of the incident. Marsh was sentenced to concurrent sentences in Tennessee and Georgia for various charges related to the incident. In both states he received sentences of twelve years in prison, as well as seventy-five years of probation.
[edit] Failures of inspection, regulation and enforcement
The Cremation Society of North America commented in response to the case that funeral homes should use only reputable crematoria for cremation of remains, and only crematoria that they trust. The Society called the treatment of remains at Tri-State "an abuse of the most sacred trust" placed in the funeral service industry, a sentiment echoed by others in the industry.
Many in the funeral industry and government pointed to a lack of regulation and inspection as a factor contributing to the incident. Many of the funeral homes never inspected the crematory to learn its operating procedures, and never ensured that cremations were actually being carried out. Although the state of Georgia had pertinent regulations, a loophole in the law allowed crematories like Tri-State who dealt only with funeral homes to operate without a license, allowing them to go without state inspection. The state has since moved to tighten its regulations.
The Tri-State incident was representative of a larger regulatory laxity regarding crematoria in the United States. Regulation in some parts of the country had been weak; some states had no regulation at all, and except for EPA emissions regulations, many crematoria had been essentially unregulated. In Michigan, for example, a change in the law was sought by a legislator who was also a funeral director, after discovering that negligent disposal of a body was not a crime in that state. Further, even where regulation was in place lack of enforcement often remained a problem, as in Ohio which was unable to enforce its laws for a time due to a lack of trained inspectors.
