A Florida man and woman were busted after 16 bodies were found decaying at a funeral home in the Panhandle.
Gregory Dunphy, 64, and 39-year-old Felicia Boesch, the daughter of the Callaway funeral home’s owner, were charged with a combined 16 misdemeanor counts of unlawful storage of human remains.
The remains of people whose families had requested cremation had not been cremated at Brock’s Home Town Funeral Home, according to the sheriff’s office.
“It’s really disgusting. Now we have to put up money again for the cremation because the low lives took the money and didn’t do their job,” Shannon Luck wrote on Facebook, according to the News Herald. “So over a month later, we have to have him moved from medical examiner’s office to another funeral home to hopefully move forward.”
Investigators found corpses in a refrigeration unit at an improper temperature, the Bay County Sheriff’s said in a Facebook post earlier this week. Other remains were in the funeral home’s main section, and none had been embalmed.
The “cooler” was required to be kept no hotter than 40 degrees, but a thermometer registered the room at 62 degrees.
“They were still receiving people,” sheriff spokeswoman Ruth Corley told the News Herald. “They weren’t closed.”
Dunphy, a funeral home employee, said he had no access to additional supplies and had run out of body bags. He said Boesch was the office administrator but her title and responsibilities were unclear, authorities said. Boesch said she performed some cremations and then declined to answer more questions.
“We are horrified, devastated and emotionally cannot fathom this,” Kimberly Gates, relative of one of the deceased, told the News Herald. “Now we can’t view her because the state she is in.”
