Governor Rick Snyder is not answering questions about state oversight days after a second criminal investigation was opened at a second Detroit Funeral Home found stockpiling human remains.
Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) has only 3 inspectors to cover 750 funeral homes statewide.
Is that enough? We were sent a new statement from the agency. It is posted below.
The Perry Funeral Home remains shut down.
On Friday, Detroit Police spent the day removing the remains of 63 fetuses, likely unclaimed by family.
They were in unrefrigerated boxes, and some were stored inside a freezer.
The manager of Perry is Gary Deak. He was inside but slammed the door on 7 Action News.
Days earlier the new owner of the former Cantrell Funeral Home called the police to report that he found 11 remains of fetuses above a lowered ceiling.
The funeral home closed in April, and he was renovating the building.
They also found additional cremated remains later.
Detroit Police sources say a lack of good records will be part of the criminal investigation.
When the state does an inspection, it does only a cursory look at the logs of human remains, not a deep dive of the chain of custody records.
Here’s the LARA statement:
We believe the current structure of the funeral home program can ultimately meet our goal of regularly inspecting homes every three years. This inspection schedule is in addition to our complaint-based inspections and inspections of new funeral homes. Like with the many other regulatory systems in our department, we are continuously reevaluating the program. Prolonged changes in the industry, including an increase in complaints and case complexity, could result in LARA shifting resources to ensure Michigan funeral homes comply with state laws and are held to the highest standards of public health and safety.
