Dart Decries County Paupers' Graves Practices

By Chuck Sudo in News on Feb 17, 2011 9:40PM

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart held a news conference this morning to list a litany of disturbing practices regarding how the county handles burying unidentified and indigent people. Dart detailed instances where bodies were collected for burial in U-Haul trucks, bodies being buried eight to a plot, and and as many as 26 babies being buried in a coffin along with body parts.

Dart said the practices by which the county handles paupers' burials also impede the process of missing persons cases and other criminal investigations in which DNA from the John Doe bodies could help identify them. Dart held the press conference to voice his support for HB 1457, sponsored by State Rep. William Cunningham of Chicago. The bill, if passed into law, would require coroners and medical examiners to take DNA samples from unidentified bodies at the time of burial and tag the bodies with a metal ID tag. to cover the costs, a $1 fee would be added to copies of death certificate requests.

The practices Dart described this morning bring to mind the 2009 discovery of graves being dug up at Burr Oak Cemetery so that the plots could be re-sold. The practice then was so extensive that the casket of Emmett Till had been removed. Dart and the Sheriff's Department closed the cemetary and it went into a court-appointed receivership.