So much for resting in peace.
If you die in Baltimore and your body goes unclaimed, there will be no flower-filled funeral home. No heartfelt remembrances from family and friends. No sad goodbyes. No tears.
Instead, your body ? a cadaver to state authorities ? may find a new short-lived career as a crash dummy to test safety features. Or it may show its patriotic side by participating in gory armor experiments for the military. Or parts of your body may end up in medical research labs. The best-case scenario? Cremation. And that happens after a 14-day waiting period. If old Uncle Joe wants his body to go elsewhere, he has two weeks for someone to claim him.
For most, the two-week cutoff makes no difference. More than half never get claimed. But for some, the two-week cutoff can be disastrous.
Take the case of Roger Frazier, a 61-year-old repairman from Fells Point, who died of heart disease last July in his Broadway Street apartment. While his landlord tried frantically to track down relatives in Philadelphia, the state?s medical examiner performed an autopsy and then sent his body to Ronald Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board, whose headquarters are in the basement of the University of Maryland Medical School?s Bressler Research Building on West Baltimore Street.
Just 22 days after he came into Wade?s custody ? and five days before his son traced his father?s body to that basement ? he was ashes.
“It took his landlady a while to find us,” Roger Frazier Jr. said. “I went to the apartment where my dad lived, but they said they took him and had him cremated. I was kind of upset.”
Still, what happened to the Fraziers is not the norm. From June to August 2006, for instance, only 13 of the 97 bodies claimed went past the 14-day limit.
“It?s a transient society,” Wade said. “You have people who are found dead on the street, and maybe they?re not from around here. Maybe there is no family, maybe no one knows if there?s family.
“Police try to locate next of kin, and we?ll contact hospital agencies and try to talk to friends, but it?s hard. There is no magic answer, and there are no investigative units.”
Frazier?s father was one of about 1,400 bodies that came into the anatomy board?s custody last year, about 40 percent of which were voluntary donors to medical research. The rest were unclaimed.
Many were Baltimore?s own with only distant relatives too hard to find or relatives who simply couldn?t afford a funeral. The others were the homeless or people passing through town. In the end, though, they are the forgotten, many of whom will end up as involuntary anatomical donations.
Chris Ammann/Baltimore Examiner – Wade keeps a watchful eye over the state?s unwanted dead.
Some of the 800 bodies that go unclaimed each year can lie in the board?s freezers, cooled to 10 below zero, waiting for as long as 12 months to be used for research. After they?re used, Wade authorizes cremation and holds the ashes for at least another year, just in case a relative comes calling.
But, like the Frazier case, how often does somebody come to retrieve a body that?s already been cremated? Wade says it doesn?t happen more than a few times a year, but he doesn?t keep statistics. The assumption is that if somebody wants to claim a body, it?ll be done sooner than later.
“There is no reason to statistically quantify this,” Wade said. “If it happened once a week, then maybe we would adjust the policy.”
The cost of afterlife
Despite federal laws that prohibit profits from cadaver sales to universities, pharmaceutical companies and medical-device firms, the monetary allowances for preparing and transporting bodies for research are sometimes abused, according to anatomical donation experts.
The potential for exploitation made headlines two years ago, when the director of the UCLA willed-body program was arrested for illegally selling about 500 cadavers to a mortuary worker, netting some $700,000. The result was a somewhat false public perception of a lucrative black-market industry, said Brent Bardley, director of the Hanover-based Anatomy Gift Registry, a nonprofit corporation that operates a whole-body donation bank.
Chris Ammann/Baltimore Examiner – Body parts of all shapes and sizes abound in Wade?s West Baltimore Street office. Here, the Maryland State Anatomy Board director displays two halves of a preserved heart.
“There isn?t a lot of oversight,” Bardley said. “These willed-body programs that operate out of universities and some states don?t have an accounting system like those of a tissue bank, which makes sure how reputable the end users are, and whether or not they are adhering to safe-handling standards and abuse prevention.”
At Maryland?s Anatomy Board, Wade said he would have to sift through thousands of files to identify where each donor or unclaimed body went, but he insists that no one profits from the sales.
“If we?re going to provide our resources, they are going to subsidize our programs here,” Wade said.
The average body costs taxpayers about $750 to embalm, transport and then cremate after the research is complete, Wade said. Because medical schools within the state pay just $125 per cadaver, to subsidize costs the board charges out-of-state schools and government-funded institutions $1,960 per cadaver.
Private medical-research firms that need bodies pay $2,500 per cadaver.
For some, like Prince Frederick (Calvert County) resident Dina Devers, the anatomy board provides desperately needed relief.
Chris Ammann/Baltimore Examiner – An educational skeleton hangs near several rows of human brains in storage at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Financial hardship forced Devers to hand the moral decision-making over to the government last August when Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring called to say her father, Garry Goheen, 69, had died of pneumonia. When she told Wade she couldn?t afford to pick up her father?s body, he told her he?d call when the ashes were available.
“I know they are using his body for experiments,” Devers said. “But I let them go ahead and take it. He didn?t have any money for a funeral.”
Still, Wade says that for some people, scientific research can give their lives meaning in death, especially those who struggled to find meaning in life.
“Maybe a person was mistreated or had a tough life,” Wade said. “At least through this, good is going to come of it.”
Protecting the state?s unwanted
Outside the basement of the Bressler Research Building, an orange fluorescent bulb casts an eerie glow over a loading dock where mortuary workers park their hearses.
Inside, Wade keeps his windowless office entirely dark, save for a dim desk light. Behind the desk, a giant Styrofoam mummy stands next to a row of human organs Wade likes to use for impromptu anatomy lessons. In a storage room down the hall, glass jars of brains fill shelves, and boxes labeled in black marker as femurs, tibias and sacrums sit stacked on a cart.
The embalming solution formaldehyde strongly permeates a hallway lined with freezer doors that are plastered with signs warning workers to place bodies on their backs only.
It?s here Wade exercises custody over the state?s unwanted dead. Raised in the funeral business, Wade softly touches arms and gently pats backs while he talks to people, reflecting a lifetime spent near grieving people.
Chris Ammann/Baltimore Examiner -Rows of human brains line the shelves in storage at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.
He calls himself protective of the bodies and establishes ground rules for himself, such as requiring private companies to use institutionally based labs for experiments.
“I?m not going to have a situation where something is found in the trash can when it shouldn?t be,” Wade said. “I?ll release custody, but I won?t release control.”
But things aren?t always as textbook as Wade likes.
Mary Dent lived at the Augsburg Lutheran Home, a continuing-care facility in Lochearn, where family and church friends visited regularly, according to a 2001 lawsuit against the anatomy board filed by her daughter, Jean Jett. When Dent?s granddaughter went to visit one day, she was told that her grandmother had died at Sinai Hospital 38 days prior and had been sent to the anatomy board, where she was cremated.
The news shocked the family, who had prepaid for funeral arrangements.
“I loved my mother dearly,” Jett told defense attorneys. “I was flying here and there, trying to find out where my mother was, where her body was.”
Jett?s attorneys argued the board can only legally embalm a body ? not destroy it.
But a judge agreed with a board attorney, who argued the state is not obligated to identify relatives and said the law implies cremation is permissible.
The lawsuit was one of only three filed against the board in the past 20 years. Each time, the board prevailed, thanks in part to laws that shield government employees from negligence claims unless their actions were provably malicious.
But Wade says he strives to incorporate compassion into the bureaucracy that governs his operation.
When Michael Coco, 46, died of liver failure in June, no one came to claim him at Bon Secours Hospital. His sister, Michelle Ritter, lived in Arkansas, which complicated arrangements.
It was Wade, Ritter said, who contacted Veterans Affairs and confirmed he was honorably discharged and his ashes were eligible for burial in the Maryland Veterans Cemetery in Crownsville, Md.
“I?m sure they are overworked and understaffed, but he really went out of his way to help me,” Ritter said. “I?m very grateful.”
Examiner Staff Writer Kathleen Cullinan contributed to this report.
