NOTE: This story has been updated to include information about a second obituary and explanation about the first one.
An obituary for a woman from High Springs, Fla., originally did not appear to express much grief over her death.
The obituary, first published on June 27 in the Cherokee Scout in North Carolina, described Cornelia June Rogers Miller as a woman who “made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life.”
The obituary described a life afflicted with drug use and addiction, and it lamented the loss not of Miller herself but of the mother figure Miller could have been.
The obituary did express gratitude for the generations spawned by Miller, noting that her grandchildren were “brighter and more attractive than the generation before them.”
Despite the obituary running in the newspaper, Chattanooga ABC station WTVC found that it was plagiarized from Dolores Aguilar's 2008 obituary that ran in the Vallejo Times-Herald in California.
Robert Miller, June Miller's son, told WTVC he didn't know who wrote the obituary, and that his mother didn't battle addiction. He thought it might have been a prank from one of his sisters.
After speaking to Robert Miller, the Cherokee Scout posted a second, more positive, obituary that refers to June as a “devoted military wife and homemaker” who “made a wicked lemon pound cake,” according to WTVC.
The small-town paper has yet to remove the original obituary from the paper or online, but publisher David Brown tells WTVC that they are considering taking it down.
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