Ashes of 96 cremated bodies found in East Point storage units

By Rhonda Cook

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Lawyers looking for records of a bankrupt funeral home business found the cremated remains of 96 people in the back of three storage units.

Fulton Medical Examiner’s Office is trying to find the relatives of those who were cremated, some as far back as 25 years ago. And the Georgia Secretary of State Office, which regulates the funeral business, has opened an investigation into the now defunct Sellers Brothers Funeral Home.

Juanita Sellers Stone, who owned the business when it closed 3 ½ years ago, told the AJC Thursday she knew the cremains were in the storage units and finding them was not “a discovery.”

“Those cremains were not abandoned,” said Stone, 81. “The goal was to retrieve them at the proper time…. The reason we keep the cremains is family members, for some reason, will not claim them and later generations will.”

She said the cremains were not held in lieu of payment.

Attorney Neil Gordon -- the trustee assign to resolve the debts of the family-owned business that started in 1920 -- said finding the cremains was a surprise and unsettling. Gordon is with the firm Arnall Golden Gregory.

“We were looking for books and records” in the East Point storage units, said started in 1920.

What they found in each was “wall to wall and floor to ceiling …books and records, odds and ends and furniture. Only in the back were the cremated remains located,” Gordon said.

“This was not what we were looking for. We were really looking for books and records and stumbled upon this,” Gordon told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday.

So far, four families have retrieved cremains while three have declined, Chief Medical Examiner Randy Hanzlick said in a statement.

The boxes containing the cremains of nine people were not marked so those ashes have not been identified. The ME’s office is still trying to reach the rest of the families so the ashes “may be returned to the legal next of kin or be given an otherwise respectful disposition.”.

Stone said her family’s business routinely held cremains for years. And these were put into storage units because one of the building where they were kept was to be demolished, Stone said.

Stone said she was upset that the perception is that the Sellers funeral home chain was negligent. “We were the custodians and we kept them well,” Stone said.

The final two locations of Sellers Brothers Funeral Home were on McDaniel Street and on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Stone now works for a funeral home business in Decatur.

Though the cremains were found in July, it is only now that families are being contacted. Gordon said he first had to locate the counties where each person died and file documents with the probate courts in each one – Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, Gwinnett and Bartow – before the cremains could be released to the Fulton medical examiner. Georgia law provides for the medical examiner or coroner to take remains that are not claimed or in cases where the family has not expressed its wishes.

Only three cases are still pending in probate court, all in Clayton County.

Stone said the families in each case had made their wishes known so that is why the cremains were kept.

“I was not expecting to have to take on such a responsibility,” Gordon said.

The nine boxes of cremains that have not been identified are with the Fulton County Medical Examiner's office, said an associate with the firm Arnall Golden Gregory.

Stone said news accounts for the remains found in storage units were “heartbreaking. I’m just upset that any portrayal would be a cloud on the reputation of my firm.”