Investigators have identified 12 of the 18 decomposing corpses discovered late last month when officials went to evict the proprietor of a South Georgia funeral home.
In a statement Friday, the GBI said it was still trying to identify the six other corpses found at Johnson Funeral & Cremation Services on Oct. 26 in Douglas, Coffee County.
The funeral parlor’s proprietor, Chris Lee Johnson, 39, has been charged with multiple counts of abuse of a dead body, and authorities said in Friday’s statement that “additional charges” were expected.
The bodies were in various stages of decomposition when they were discovered, and the business was immediately shuttered.
Officials said Friday relatives of the identified decedents had been informed and been given “necessary information ... to finalize arrangements for their loved ones.”
The GBI has not publicly divulged the names of the dead people whose bodies they have identified.
Investigators said they expect to ID the six other bodies “soon.”
They are also probing another troubling aspect of the case: Whether cremains given to families of people whose bodies had been handled by the funeral parlor were actual human cremains or, perhaps, other substances, and whether they were sent to the right families.
In the days after Johnson’s arrest, the widow of a man whose body had, as best she knew, been cremated at the funeral home told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “It could be somebody else’s ashes. You never know. ... It takes a sick person, a very sick person, to do something like this.”
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