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Norman Medford Peden Funeral Home and Crematory in Marietta,
about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Atlanta, caught fire
earlier this year. The building was up for a foreclosure auction
before the fire happened. The cause of the fire is undetermined,
and the building is set to be demolished.
Six agencies are now involved in figuring out what was happening
inside the funeral home, including Marietta police, Cobb County
Fire and Emergency Services, the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation, the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, the
Cobb County Medical Examiner’s Office and the Georgia Secretary
of State’s Office, WSB-TV reported Thursday.
They say they are looking for family members who used the
business to handle their loved one’s burial or cremation.
“We are trying to find out where that money is,” Noula Zaharia
with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office Cemeteries Division
said of the thousands of dollars many families prepaid for
funerals.
On Wednesday, the station reported what photographer Ben James,
who traveled from England to photograph the abandoned funeral
home, said he found in the building.
“Bank statements of burials, bank statements of people who had
paid for burials. I’ve found lots of ashes at funeral homes,
maybe one or two, but to find this amount was crazy, I’ve never
seen such a big amount,” James said. “It was very alarming.”
James said he found more than 30 urns and bags of human ashes.
Some were labeled with names, others weren’t. He said he also
found family photos, death certificates, credit card information
and hazardous chemicals.
“There was a discarded human fetus in a jar just left in the
embalming room," James said. “What’s the back story to it? How
can that just have been forgotten about? It’s very sad.”
A similar situation unfolded in another Georgia city last month.
A funeral home owner in Douglas, about 200 miles (320
kilometers) southeast of Atlanta, was arrested and accused of
neglecting human corpses after authorities said they found 18
bodies in various stages of decomposition while serving an
eviction notice at the business.
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