Bizarre, Politics, Society

Don’t Bring Out Your Dead: Detroit Overwhelmed By Unclaimed Bodies

Detroit has long fascinated observers as a major city in political and economic meltdown. In addition to continual political scandals and corruption investigations of its leaders, Detroit has soaring crime and debt that are accelerating a downward spiral. Now, in something out of Roger & Me, the city is dealing with a massive stack of corpses as people abandon loved ones due to a lack of money to bury them.

There are currently over 70 bodies piled up in the mortuary — unclaimed by their families and friends in a city with an unemployment rate of 28 percent.

In June, the city’s $21,000 annual county budget to bury Detroit’s unclaimed bodies was exhausted. The City is currently short $300 million in its overall budget. Yet, families were unwilling to pay for burials and preferred for Wayne County to spend the $700 for a rough pine casket at a nearby cemetery and a marker. Now the city itself cannot afford the burials and has begged for private donations to help bury the dead.

For the full story, click here.

11 thoughts on “Don’t Bring Out Your Dead: Detroit Overwhelmed By Unclaimed Bodies”

  1. I find these comparisons and jokes rather offensive… I am sympathetic to people who are so deep in poverty that they cannot afford to bury their loved ones. Just because someone is at a lack of financial assets does not make them a bad person.

    There are many community groups in Detroit who are trying to raise money for this problem, and there is a monthly volunteer service at a local funeral home to remember the unclaimed.

    This problem is a sign of the times. The economy is falling apart. While some “middle class” folks are falling into “working class”, poor people are just falling deeper into poverty.

    Have some heart.

  3. eniobob,

    That story caught my eye too. Don’t get me wrong. I loathe pedophiles. Although in all fairness at that boy’s age I don’t know if one bad contact – as described in the account I read – does a child molester make. Hormonal stupidity has caused kids to do as bad or worse before. That being said, true pedophiles need to be removed from society for all our protection. But this was going too far. In every sense of the term “too far”.

  5. Now that was a funny movie. Sorry for the repeat, the original embedded video didn’t show up until a refresh.

  7. How desperate do you have to be to not be able to bury your relatives and loved ones? I am not sure that people who can pay for it are taking the money and running without burying their dead. When you are out of work and out of hope, nothing makes sense anymore.

  8. And yet the U.S. is spending billions on Iraqi construction/reconstuction, on that war and AfPak war, while continuing to kill their innocent citizens.

    We *are* living a ‘Monty Python’ script in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world filled with Orwellian ‘logic’.

    What kind of people would abandon their own blood relatives to be stacked like decaying cordwood in the county morgue? We have not only lost our sense, we have abandoned our sensibilities and we are closing in on moral bankruptcy.

  10. What is the sound of one hand fiddling, Alex?

    I’ll take “Take the Money and ______” for $500.

  11. Another one died in Detroit? Somebody noticed? I thought it was run by people that were blind. How else could one explain all of the evil that partakes of this city?

    Isn’t this where Harry Houdini died on the afternoon of Halloween, October 31, 1926?

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