Families can't afford cost of dying

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) - In a sign of how tough times are for some people the Office of the Medical Investigator reports it is being forced to keep corpses longer than usual because more families cannot afford funerals.

On average OMI holds around 75 sets of remains that are waiting to be claimed. But recently they've had as many as 110, Wendy Honeyfield of OMI said.

And for that the economy is to blame, according to Charlie Finegan of Riverside Funeral Home in Albuquerque. His mortuary has been doing a lot more cremations than ever before, he added.

"Dramatic, very dramatic," Finegan said. "I'm building my whole business on the economical cremation."

Cremation is much cheaper than a traditional funeral service. Finegan said burials can run around $3,000 while he charges $700 to $800 to cremate remains.

But recently even that's becoming too expensive for a lot of people.

Honeyfield said families are needing more time to come up with money for funeral expenses. By state law OMI only has to give them two weeks.

"Space is pretty limited for us," Honeyfield said. "We try and give them as much time as they can handle or our space can handle."

Eventually if no one makes funeral arrangements or even comes forward to claim a body, OMI turns the remains over to the county where the deceased lived.

In Bernalillo County Finegan does the cremations for indigents.

"I think I do 85 to 100 a year," he said.

Most of the remains sit waiting to be claimed. Of the 200 bodies Finegan has cremated for the county in the past couple years only 15 have been picked up, Finegan said.

"The county has possession of the cremains until the family reimburses the county," Finegan added.

By law families have up to two years to reimburse the county to get the remains back.

Most bodies don't go through the state morgue in Albuquerque. OMI only looks at cases where the death is violent, questionable, accidental or unattended.