Long Journey Home: Veterans' Cremains Laid To Rest After Years In Courthouse Basement
Jun 3, 2018TPR's Carson Frame attended a ceremony honoring eight veterans whose cremains were only recently found. Up until recently, the veterans’ cremains sat in the basement of the Potter County Courthouse on a shelf. Those cremains were escorted from Amarillo to San Antonio by members of the Patriot Guard Riders, Bexar County Sheriffs and others. Together, they represented four branches of the military, with combined service in the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam. When they died homeless on the streets, no one claimed them. They were cremated as wards of the county. Last year, Joel Carver, the co-owner of A To D Mortuary Services in Amarillo, noticed the unclaimed cremains as part of his work. The Amarillo Globe-News reported that Carver “contracts with his mortuary service company for the cremation of the homeless or indigent.” Carver started researching and requested help from the Missing In America Project, a nonprofit whose purpose is to locate, identify and inter the unclaimed cremated remains of American veterans with help from private, state and federal organizations. Joyce Earnest, the Texas state coordinator for MIAP, said her organization acts as an intermediary between funeral homes, courthouses and military burial services. “We’ll go into a funeral home and inventory all the cremains they have stored. Then we send the information for verification,” she said. “Just last year, MIAP found and interred one (set of cremains) that had been sitting on a shelf since 1936.” Once MIAP locates someone’s cremains, they send the accompanying information — name, social security, date of birth and date of death — to Jefferson Barracks, a records storage site for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Jefferson Barracks determines whether that cremain belongs to a veteran. Earnest spoke at Friday’s memorial service and accepted burial flags in the absence of the veterans’ family members. The eight men honored were Don Stewart, Cody Was...
