LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY – She didn’t know the man in the casket, never met him or his family. Yet, Kate Hopkins stood watch over 48-year-old Francisco Carmona’s funeral on a gray, cold day in a Kentucky cemetery.
Hopkins joined a group of students, a few county employees and a deputy coroner Feb. 6 to ensure Carmona, who died in January in a hospital with no family or friends, had a service — the 91st service for the poor in the city of Louisville since Nov. 1.
“We don’t come into the world alone. We shouldn’t leave it alone,” Hopkins said of her practice of attending funerals for paupers since her son first volunteered six years ago.
Counties across the U.S., with its still-weak economy, are seeing more cases of unclaimed bodies and families who can’t afford to bury or cremate a loved one. Every situation is unique, but coroners and local government officials tell a similar story: The economic downturn has left many people without the money to pay for funeral services that can cost thousands of dollars, and it’s falling on cities and states to cover the bills.
Buddy Dumeyer, a Louisville deputy coroner who runs the indigent burial program, has seen the annual number of pauper burials in Jefferson County jump from 65 in 2005 to 300 in 2012. The deaths cover everything from families who can’t afford a funeral to people with no one to claim their remains.
Sixteen states now subsidize the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies. Chicago has used mass graves, and in Los Angeles, bodies are routinely cremated. In Tennessee, medical examiner and coroners’ offices donate unclaimed remains to the Forensic Anthropological Research Center, known as the “Body Farm,” where students study decomposition at the University of Tennessee. The facility has had to stop accepting the donations at times in recent years because it received so many.
The U.S. economy fell into a deep recession in 2008 — a dip it has slowly been pulling out of. Nationally, the unemployment rate is 7.9 percent. The cost of a regular adult funeral is about $6,500, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.
Funeral homes are generally cooperative in setting up a burial if the body goes unclaimed, but balk at the expense, said Kevin Kirby, a funeral home owner and coroner in Kentucky. “Some will not do them,” Kirby said. “We feel like we should. They deserve a burial like everyone else.”
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