Ohio officials urge those who’ve used a Toledo funeral home for burial services of a dearly departed loved one this year to contact the Lucas County Coroner’s Office at 419-213-3900 without delay.
What’s the hurry? Because evidently there’s a good chance that their cremation and/or entombment by the now-ignominious Tate Funeral Home was either not performed according to law, or, worse, not done at all.
Tate and its management are currently under investigation ever since about a dozen bodies -- including that of an infant -- were discovered unceremoniously stashed in a damp backroom at its 3302 Lagrange facility in north Toledo.
All of the neglected corpses were said to be stored there in cremation boxes or in body bags, and it hasn’t been determined yet whether any were actually embalmed.
State officials and the licensing division of the Ohio Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors are trying to get to the bottom of that ghoulish pileup, and to ascertain just how many dead people have been abused in such a heartless manner.
In the meantime, attorneys speaking on behalf of the suspected-rogue funeral parlor insist that "all deceased individuals were timely embalmed in accordance with Ohio law," and "any delay in cremation resulted from physicians failing to timely provide death certificates."
According to Ohio authorities, the burial backlog at Tate's north Toledo funeral home apparently began sometime in January.
