When you die in Sedgwick County and no one claims your body

Charles Raymer, 54, suffered a heart attack while unloading a truck in June and died in an emergency room.

Kim Olson, 62, who had heart disease, was found dead on the floor of his apartment at a senior complex in March.

Kenneth Hand, 55, died of an accidental heroin overdose in a homeless shelter on Thanksgiving Day 2015.

Their final resting places are the small white boxes containing their ashes inside a secured room in an off-white metal industrial park building in Haysville.

It’s here, at Preferred Mortuary Service, where the remains of those who are unclaimed stay indefinitely until family members or close friends – if there are any – come forward.

Over the past five years, the number of unclaimed remains has increased in Sedgwick County, in part because the state stopped paying a $550 death benefit to help bury the poor.

This is what happens to them.

The search

Bruce Yearley. Evelyn Bryant. Nam Van Le. Virginia Vine. “Infant female” with no name listed.

Those are just a few of the 124 unclaimed remains in Sedgwick County since 2010.

After death – which could have been natural, foul play or accidental – their journey began at the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center, where an autopsy may have been conducted to determine the cause of death.

Then begins the search for family.

Do you know someone who is unclaimed? Search the database:

If the death occurred at the person’s home, investigators have more opportunities for clues.

“We have the convenience of being able to look through their personal belongings: address books, mail, Christmas cards. But once it’s determined no family is available through information at the residence, we start our search process,” said Shari Beck, chief medical investigator at the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center.

Medical investigators use information from multiple agencies and databases. The bodies are fingerprinted and run through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a national law enforcement database. Social media profiles are checked for connections.

Investigators will try to find friends and neighbors who might have a lead or know of a family member’s name.

“Usually one lead will lead to another and another until we just hit a dead end,” Beck said.

The search may take 60 to 90 days, or sometimes up to a year. The remains stay at the center during the investigation.

But if family can’t be found, the person is declared “indigent” and placed on an official list to have his or her body buried or cremated at taxpayer expense.

That’s when Preferred Mortuary Service is contacted to either have the body cremated and stored, or buried.

On the rise

In 2010, the state stopped giving a $550 burial benefit for clients of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services because of state budget cuts, so the county had to cover the expense.

“We saw a significant uptick in the number of indigents that we would have at any point in time,” said Timothy Rohrig, director of the Sedgwick County Regional Forensic Science Center.

“Prior to 2010, on average we had five to seven indigents a year. When SRS started no longer subsidizing, we saw an increase and started going up to 15 and 19.”

Statewide, the subsidized program helped cover funeral expenses for 1,194 people in 2009. For the first seven months of the 2010 fiscal year – July to January – the program covered 589 people, 170 of whom were in Sedgwick County.

Some funeral homes would accept the $550 burial benefit as payment in full, Rohrig said.

In Sedgwick County in 2015, there were 19 people whose remains were unclaimed. As of Dec. 19, there were 28 unclaimed for 2016.

More cremations

So far this year, all unclaimed remains have been cremated and not buried, according to county records.

It costs $695 for cremations and between $1,213 and $3,115 for burials.

While there is a cost savings for the county to move to cremation, it’s mainly being done because of the difficulty in finding plots for the unclaimed bodies, Rohrig said.

Nationwide, more people are being cremated, he said.

“Even some of the religious bodies, in the past the Catholic Church was totally opposed to cremation, but now are more accepting and allow it after you have a funeral Mass,” Rohrig said.

But it can be difficult to know what a person’s last wishes were, and “in many instances we do not know the faith of the individual,” Rohrig said.

The county requires that all of the bodies are individually cremated and there are no “co-mingled remains,” Rohrig said.

Up until 2010, the bodies were buried at one of three cemeteries in town.

After Preferred Mortuary Services prepared the body for burial, mortuary workers went to the cemetery and stayed there while the remains were put in the ground, said Kim Strohm, owner of Preferred Mortuary Services, which also has a contract with the coroner’s office for transporting bodies.

Grave markers with the person’s name, birth date and death date were provided. They were put in metal, sealed caskets and then placed in concrete vaults.

“None have been buried in anything less,” she said.

‘Family’

There are times when families are found but they decline to take custody of the remains, said Beck, the chief medical investigator.

“Some of these that hang around here for quite some time are where we’ve found family who indicate they want to claim and then disappear,” she said.

“So it leaves us a little bit in limbo so we continue to try to track them down again.”

Only one family has claimed remains in the past 20 years, according to county spokesperson Keturah Austin. The county has no set guideline on whether families claiming remains have to pay back the county for burial or cremation expenses to have the remains released to them, she said, and future situations would be evaluated on an individual basis.

One factor in the number of unclaimed remains could be the rising costs of funerals. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the median price for a funeral was $7,045 in 2012.

But Rohrig doesn’t think that’s the only reason.

“The unfortunate thing in today’s society is some families become estranged and they either didn’t know they had a cousin, or didn’t like the cousin,” he said. “It’s not simple and there’s not one particular reason (people don’t claim someone). There’s a whole host of rationale. And oftentimes we don’t know. We reach out to somebody, a brother, and then they fall off our radar screen. We don’t know why they decided not to follow through.”

“As we get older, we start losing family members, and with this more dispersed mobile society, that’s likely a piece of it.”

It’s rare for the county to contact Preferred Mortuary Services about a relative claiming someone whose remains have been in the secured room in the metal building in Haysville.

“It’s kind of a blessing when they do,” Strohm said. “It’s like, ‘thank you.’ ”

“You always have the hope that somebody steps up,” said Brandon Dossie, Strohm’s son.

“We’re family,” Strohm said. “We attach to them, we consider them – we’re sort of the only family they have left.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2016 at 4:41 PM with the headline "When you die in Sedgwick County and no one claims your body."