Shelved and forgotten: What happens to Beaufort County’s dead when nobody wants them?

The cremated remains of 59 people who died in Beaufort County sit on a closet shelf in the coroner’s office.

They include Stacey, who lived alone. Ten years ago, his landlord went to demand three months of overdue rent. Instead, he found Stacey’s lifeless body. The coroner’s office could not find the man’s family. He had listed himself as his emergency contact. Only his last name is scrawled on the cardboard box that holds his ashes.

Efforts were underway to find a plot of land where he and the county’s other unclaimed dead could be laid to rest after The Island Packet & Beaufort Gazette reported on the county’s lack of a paupers’ cemetery or other final resting spot for its unclaimed dead in 2015.

“It would be the decent and correct thing to do,” said Ed Allen, Beaufort County coroner, who was heading the charge. “After all, these people were still someone’s loved ones. The ultimate goal is to try to find a resting place.”

But efforts stalled.

St. John’s Lutheran Church in Beaufort considered taking on the unclaimed remains. But in June, the church council “decided not to proceed further with a cemetery,” according to a statement from the church.

When asked whose responsibility it was that no solutions had yet been found, Allen said, “It’s mine as an elected official.” Then, he amended his answer: “It would have to be a joint effort between county administration, (county) council and me.”

The main challenge, Allen said, is that designating a permanent home for the cremains is not a county priority.

Other matters are “more pressing,” he said. Population growth in Beaufort County means he is preoccupied with the day-to-day operations of the coroner’s office.

Since the story ran, some family members have come to claim their loved ones, but four more boxes of cremated remains have been added to the shelf.

Abandoned and anonymous

With its white walls and blue carpet, and a lavender-scented air freshener sitting on a file cabinet, the office closet looks much as it did two years ago: In a word, mundane.

A casual observer might assume those boxes held Manila envelopes or paper records. But they are the remains of humans, people who once lived and were loved, and whose stories are now forgotten, capped by a lid on a box. Most of the small boxes are cardboard, sealed shut with tape, stacked on top of each other.

The coroner’s office acquires two or three unclaimed dead every year, Allen said, and the earliest cremains are from 1982. One box bears the label, “Stillborn, ’89.” There are a few Jane and John Does, but most have been identified – people whose families were never found, or whose loved ones couldn’t pay the $600 to $1,000 fee to cover cremation, transportation and death certificate fees.

In other cases, family members simply don’t care to claim the dead. One box, for instance, is filled with the cremains of a man who was estranged from his son, the only family member Allen was able to track down.

“His son said, ‘He didn’t do anything for me. You got him, keep him,’ ” Allen, 69, said.

So, the father’s ashes have stayed in the office closet.

Usually the challenge is finding a person’s next of kin. But sometimes, the difficult thing is identifying the body itself.

Allen recalled a Hispanic man whose body was found on Hilton Head a couple of years ago. The man’s skeletal remains are now in Charleston, being examined by an anthropologist. It’s difficult to find a DNA match, Allen said, because the man was foreign-born. The man remains nameless.

Another way?

Nearby, Jasper County operates by a different system. After coroner Martin Sauls III cremates the bodies of the unclaimed, he places them in two crypts in a marble mausoleum.

Sauls has worked as coroner for 38 years. But he also operates a Sauls Funeral Home, a private business founded as a carpentry shop by his great-grandfather in 1865, and which his grandfather turned into a funeral home business in the early 1900s. Sauls has two locations, in Ridgeland and Bluffton. He keeps the crypts with unclaimed remains on his cemetery plot in Bluffton, on the corner of Bluffton Parkway and Simmonsville Road.

The nearly 35-mile stretch of Interstate 95 that runs through Jasper County means the population is a lot more transient than that of its coastal neighbor. Jasper County is home to many more unclaimed remains than Beaufort County is, with Sauls cremating 10 to 12 bodies some years. But unlike in Beaufort County, most unclaimed bodies in Jasper County are impossible to identify.

Several bodies left nameless have been foreigners – likely Hispanic migrantswho were looking for work, Sauls said. He recalled one incident a few years ago, when a 16-passenger van wrecked on I-95.

“As soon as it turned over, all but one of them disappeared,” Sauls said. “The guy who didn’t disappear got killed in the wreck. He had no identification on him. There was no way of knowing who he was.”

Under state law, coroners must wait 30 days before they cremate unclaimed bodies and dispose of the ashes. But Sauls hasn’t disposed of any cremains yet.

“That’s somebody’s son or somebody’s mama or somebody’s daddy,” Sauls said. “I just can’t bring myself to do it.”

Sauls, a 73-year-old Lowcountry native who wears a lobster-patterned bow tie and speaks with a heavy drawl, used to do things differently.

Before he began operating out of his Bluffton location in 2001, he used to bury unclaimed remains in a potter’s field – another name for a paupers’ cemetery – in a Ridgeland cemetery. This was before he had a crematorium, so he would bury the body in a Ziegler case, a steel casket with a lid that seals shut.

Two bodies had been identified and claimed during his tenure as coroner, Sauls said.

Both were young women.

The first Jane Doe was found by a passerby in 1989, stuffed in duffel bag that had been set on fire and abandoned by a Ridgeland road. Several years later, in 1995, the Naval Crime Investigation Service followed a lead that the body might belong to a woman named Jeanne Marie Tahan from Charleston. Sauls exhumed the body, and the NCIS was right: Tahan had been beaten to death and set on fire by her boyfriend and the father of her three children.

The second instance occurred about 20 years ago, Sauls said. This Jane Doe was dressed in a motorcycle jacket and had been dumped in the middle of I-95. Sauls thought someone would certainly come along and claim her – and after several months, eventually someone did. She’d been missing from Daytona Beach, Florida.

The potter’s field filled up, Sauls said, and the Ziegler cases were expensive. He’s been cremating bodies for about 20 years, and he now has about 100 plastic urns placed in two crypts in his Bluffton cemetery.

But now, the crypts are beginning to fill up too, Sauls said. He suspects he’ll have to create another potter’s field in his Bluffton cemetery, where he’ll bury the urns.

“When I do bury them, I will bury them in the cemetery. And I will mark the grave,” Sauls said.

“Unclaimed,” the grave markers will say.

“It isn’t a dead issue.”

It’s a good deal for Jasper County. The county used to give Sauls $200 of annual funding, but now he cremates the bodies at his own expense, Sauls said. In addition, Sauls has a connection to the county government: Sauls’ son, Martin Sauls IV, is a councilman for Jasper County. If Beaufort County were to reach out to him – and be willing to fund a burial – he’d be happy to make space available, Sauls said.

But funding for a paupers’ cemetery isn’t in his budget, Allen said.

“Jasper County is one the poorer counties in the state in terms of resources,” Allen said. “But then you look at Beaufort County, it’s one of the more affluent counties of the state in terms of per capita income, but yet we … can’t provide that simple service.”

Beaufort County Council Chairman Paul Sommerville said it’s up to Allen to propose funding for a paupers’ cemetery in his yearly budget. He’d first have to discuss his proposal with the county administrator, and only then would it be brought forward to a county council committee.

Allen said before he can do any of that, he must find available land that won’t add up to a hefty cost for the county. Beaufort County does not own any cemeteries; however, Allen is a leader of the local Sixteen Gate group, which owns a cemetery across the street from the now closed Kmart in Beaufort. But that cemetery is running out of room, Allen said, leaving little space for a paupers’ plot.

A few days after first being interviewed for this story in January, Allen began reaching out to cemeteries maintained by the city of Beaufort, he said.

Allen formally proposed a paupers’ cemetery once before in 2009, at the beginning of his tenure, at a public safety committee meeting. Then-Councilwoman Laura Von Harten argued that the county had no obligation to memorialize anyone.

“She (Von Harten) said her grandmother got lost at sea and she probably got eaten by a shark …,” council minutes from December 7, 2009 noted, and “she is probably in the molecules of some Cubans right now.”

Other factors must be considered too, said Sommerville. What happens if a family member is upset that their loved one hasn’t been buried in a certain religious custom? What happens if a person’s ashes were scattered, and then a family member came forward to claim them?

And if the county offered free burials, Sommerville suspects that “we would be inundated with folks who suddenly couldn’t afford to bury Uncle Charlie.”

“There’s no silver bullet, no clear answer,” said Josh Gruber, interim county administrator. “The state requires the coroner to cremate the remains, but it doesn’t say what to do after that cremation.”

Gruber remembered discussing the possibility of a paupers’ cemetery after the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette story was published in 2015. Once the church decided not to through with the paupers’ cemetery, though, Gruber said those conversations stopped.

“I’d be happy to work with the coroner if he brought it up again,” Gruber said.

Allen says he hasn’t given up.

“It isn’t a dead issue with me,” he said.

This story was originally published January 27, 2018 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Shelved and forgotten: What happens to Beaufort County’s dead when nobody wants them?."