SHELTON, Wash. - Traditionally the cemetery is the place you think of when it comes to a final resting place, but what happens when no one comes forward to claim your remains?
"They have died from various causes. The investigations are long done. They are simply people with no one to claim them," said Mason County Coroner Wes Stockwell.
Stockwell's job is to reunite the cremated remains with their long lost loved ones.
"I had a lady in Texas call me, tell me her brother who she had not seen from or heard from in 20 years was on my list," said Stockwell.
Stockwell has 22 unclaimed remains dating back 15 years, so he's turned to the Internet. He posted the names of the unclaimed remains on the county Web site.
Already four families have come forward in just four days, including one Shelton couple who lost their dad's remains in a landlord dispute.
One woman called from Arkansas to say she didn't know what happened to her ex-husband, who she divorced but left on good terms.
"She was not aware (he) had died," said Stockwell.
But no one has come forward for Charles William Donnatelli, who was cremated at Bellevue's Green Sunset Cemetery in 1986.
"They are from a 20-year-old man who apparently died and was cremated in Bellevue and somehow ended up in Mason County in a storage unit," said Stockwell.
The unclaimed remains turn out to be the skeletons in the closet that families are happy to discover.
"My job is to help people if I can, in this case reconnect them with their loved one. I would rather do that than put them in a communal vault somewhere or in a closet of a funeral home," said Stockwell.
The list
Manley Emerson Beard (died Oct. 30, 2005)
Lowell Berfield (May 7, 1998)
Jerry Clark (March 15, 2004)
Ford Cochran (Oct. 29, 2000)
Virginia K. Davis (Oct. 1, 1999)
Charles William Donnatelli (March 23, 1986)
Alice H. Eberhart (Feb. 22, 1998)
Manuel Galen Govia (Jan. 7, 2010)
Arthur Harning (Feb. 17, 2001)
Dale Gilbert Johnson (June 24, 2005)
Richard A. Kooyman (Nov. 10, 2003)
Dan Kozlowske (Jan. 21, 2007)
Kenneth Mehawk (Jan. 10, 2001)
William G. Poe (June 27, 2000)
Bonnie Lois Sala (Oct. 18, 1998)
Victor Santis-Lopez (March 19, 2003)
Earl Richard Stanley (Nov. 16, 2001)
Nellie B. Stock (Dec. 26, 1996)
Thomas Thompson (July 26, 2000);
Freddie J. Thornton (Jan. 13, 1998)
John L. Wisdom (March 15, 1999)
Morris Dewayne Danner (Feb. 10, 2010).
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