Montgomery County employees arrange Vietnam vet’s burial beside mother
, 2022-05-27 21:00:30,
John Williams died alone in the hospital two days after Christmas last year.
Abington Memorial Hospital patient records listed no family contacts, which meant the body of the 76-year-old man was transferred to the county coroner, the standard operating procedure for unclaimed dead in Pennsylvania. It often means their remains end up in a county storage room or buried in a mass grave.
In Montgomery County, where Williams lived and died, however, the coroner’s office handles the abandoned dead a little differently.
On Friday, after months of searching for next of kin, Williams’ final wishes were fulfilled.
His ashes were buried in a Willow Grove cemetery beside his mother, Evelyn, who died in 1984.
The mourners at his Friday service were mostly county employees whom Williams never met. It was through their efforts he was able to be buried in the place where he wanted to be.
When Williams’ body arrived at the coroner’s office late last year, it was initially sent to Humanity’s Gifts, an organization that donates bodies to local medical schools, Montgomery County First Deputy Coroner Alexander Balacki said.
But Williams’ body was rejected. The program learned he had served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, and it doesn’t accept military veterans since they can qualify for a free burial with honors at a veterans cemetery.
Over the last four years, the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office has identified and arranged the burials of at least eight veterans who had gone unclaimed. Some of them had been dead for years, but their veteran status was not known at the time of their death.
Currently, the office is awaiting military paperwork for seven unclaimed veterans who died in the last year, Balacki said. Their ashes likely will be interred at the National…
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