Unclaimed dead stack up in county morgue!
DETROIT, Michigan - August 6, 2009 - His corpse lies at the bottom of a pile of other bodies unclaimed at the Wayne County morgue. But Grandpa - whose name has been withheld to avoid embarrassing his family - is a special case. He has been in the cooler for the past two years as his kinfolk - too broke to bury him - wait for their economic condition to improve.
"There is destitution," says Dr. Carl J. Schmidt, the chief medical examiner of this, the nation's poorest big city. "But when you're so destitute that nobody has claimed you, that's a whole different level of being destitute."
Peering into the small glass window of the cooler door, Schmidt counts 52 unclaimed bodies stacked like cordwood - in some cases four to a shelf - always two to a gurney.
Generally, the economic well-being of a municipality is measured by unemployment rates and quarterly earnings reports. But Schmidt's cooler may say as much about metropolitan Detroit's financial health as any statistics released by the Federal Reserve.
"It really is a sign of how bad things have gotten," says Schmidt, 52, a 16-year veteran of the Detroit death scene. "Some people really have to make a choice of putting food on the table or burying their loved ones. It is really very sad. In all of my years here, I have never seen it this bad."
But nowadays people are using his cooler like a no-charge cold storage facility, he says. Corpses linger longer and longer as family members wait for a paycheck, a tax return, the lottery, or a lawsuit to get the money needed to give their dead a proper burial. Therefore, Grandpa lingers. Some of the dead have even been signed over to the county by people either unable or unwilling to pay for the burial.
"There is destitution," says Dr. Carl J. Schmidt, the chief medical examiner of this, the nation's poorest big city. "But when you're so destitute that nobody has claimed you, that's a whole different level of being destitute."
Peering into the small glass window of the cooler door, Schmidt counts 52 unclaimed bodies stacked like cordwood - in some cases four to a shelf - always two to a gurney.
Generally, the economic well-being of a municipality is measured by unemployment rates and quarterly earnings reports. But Schmidt's cooler may say as much about metropolitan Detroit's financial health as any statistics released by the Federal Reserve.
"It really is a sign of how bad things have gotten," says Schmidt, 52, a 16-year veteran of the Detroit death scene. "Some people really have to make a choice of putting food on the table or burying their loved ones. It is really very sad. In all of my years here, I have never seen it this bad."
But nowadays people are using his cooler like a no-charge cold storage facility, he says. Corpses linger longer and longer as family members wait for a paycheck, a tax return, the lottery, or a lawsuit to get the money needed to give their dead a proper burial. Therefore, Grandpa lingers. Some of the dead have even been signed over to the county by people either unable or unwilling to pay for the burial.
