Overdoses: Unclaimed Bodies Crowd Morgues

United States -- Drug overdoses are not news, drug overdose deaths are not news anymore. What hasn't been talked about, what happens to those who have died ...

Unclaimed Bodies From the Opiod Epidemic Are Crowding Morgues - The AtlanticSarah Krebs is used to corpses going missing. As a detective who works in the missing-persons unit in Detroit, she has solved dozens of cases by matching up disappeared people to unidentified bodies left in state custody. But for older cases in which the county was supposed to have buried the body, Krebs says it's common for her to order an exhumation from the local cemetery and discover that the body she's looking for is not there.

Anywhere from a few days to a few years later, those bones might turn up in a separate burial plot, or in a box on a medical examiner's shelf, or in a law-enforcement evidence room, or in a county employee's house. "I have multiple, multiple cases where we thought the body was buried and we found a couple days later that someone had it at home," Krebs says.The reason for this morbid confusion is that the United States is enduring a cadaver pileup. Medical examiners around the country are being overrun with bodies that no one comes to pick up, a trend that many coroners attribute to the nation's opioid epidemic. Drug-overdose deaths increased by 10 percent from 2016 to 2017, largely driven by fentanyls and similar drugs, according to the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention. Now medical examiners in cities such as Detroit process dozens of new remains each day. And as Krebs has encountered, some of those bodies can slip under the radar.

The bodies that remain accounted for, meanwhile, float in and out of state custody. No one is quite sure what to do with them. The United States has no uniform system for managing the unclaimed. There is no federal law outlining what steps to take, and many states do not have clear procedures, leaving individual medical examiners to make decisions about how to best deal with the bodies. As a result, examiners without money to simply bury or cremate the remains are resorting to inventive—and strange—solutions.Among the unclaimed bodies processed in the United States, some are the unidentified remains from missing-persons cases like the ones Krebs works on, but the majority belong to people who were estranged from their family while they were alive, according to Kenna Quinet, an associate professor at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis who co-wrote one of the only academic articles on unclaimed bodies. In most of these cases, the identity of the victim is known, but coroners or funeral directors can't contact the next of kin, or the next of kin was reached and either doesn't want the body or can't afford to bury it. The unclaimed population skews poor and homeless.

Policy makers have rarely backed programs that would set clear terms for the management of the unclaimed, which has left coroners to cycle through a grab bag of disposition methods once a body enters their custody. Coroners often opt to cremate unclaimed remains to save money—burials cost at least twice as much—but some states don't allow coroners to request a cremation for fear that it could infringe on the deceased's religious values. In smaller counties that have fewer unclaimed bodies, bodies are kept in coolers; those that are cremated are left in boxes or in a coroner's closet. Read Full Article