The Maui Police Department requested assistance Tuesday in identifying the families of 13 unclaimed bodies currently held at the department’s forensic facility.
The 13 bodies have death dates largely between June and October, although one man died in June 2023. Their names are: Mark Reese, Ken Fujii, Robert Richardson, Luke Wirth, Hey Hall, Ruth Early, Andrea Gordon, Tisse Henriksen, Patric Brock, Alvaro Marin, Walter Leskuski, David Clay and Burnett Akiu.
Anyone with information about their family members is encouraged to call (808) 463-3833.
This had Aloha State Daily wondering: what is the process for dealing with unclaimed bodies? We asked officials on O‘ahu, Maui and Hawai‘i Island about their processes.
The nameless dead
Jeremie Evangelista, acting assistant chief for the Hawai‘i Police Department’s Administrative Services Division, said the police department holds bodies as part of coroner’s inquests: investigations into the circumstances of a death.
“If someone finds a body in a public place, the police obviously gets called because they didn’t die in the care of someone,” Evangelista said. “We have to figure out their identities; we can’t contact next-of-kin if we don’t know who they are.”
This can take time. Officials on all three islands each described flexible schedules for determining corpses’ identities; Phillip Verso, public information officer for the Honolulu Department of the Medical Examiner, told ASD that “there is no specific time limit on how long the Department may hold unclaimed individuals.”
Currently, the DME has 12 unclaimed decedents in its care, Verso said, and the only limit for how long they can be held is the capacity of cold storage. Last year, the department’s morgue had its storage capacity increased from 60 to 140 bodies.
Some bodies can be held for years. MPD’s release this week included in its list of the dead Mark Reese, who died in June 2023 at the age of 81 and has been held ever since.
Tricia-Lee Lum Ho, MPD’s Morgue Operations Clerk, said Reese had been unidentified for quite some time, and was only positively identified recently.
Evangelista said HPD — which currently only has one unclaimed body in storage — will hold bodies in custody “as long as necessary” to find next of kin, which has led to bodies being held for years.
Family matters
When next-of-kin have been identified, it can still take time for them to claim the body. Lum Ho said family members can, understandably, be overwhelmed by the stress of the death of a loved one and preparing for funeral arrangements. In some cases, she said, family members have gotten back to MPD after weeks or months of raising funds for a funeral.
Lum Ho said MPD makes multiple efforts to reach multiple people within a decedent’s family, which itself is time-consuming. Next-of-kin follows an order of precedence, from spouses to adult children to parents and so on down the line.
Some family members may decline to claim a body. In those cases, Lum Ho said bodies can be claimed by non-relatives. She said one body was claimed from the MPD in February by an unrelated woman; in other examples, she said organizations like a church group with a connection to the deceased could claim the body.
Each official emphasized that the process is not to be rushed. Verso said the Department of the Medical Examiner provides “compassionate guidance to families navigating their loss.”
Disposal
But sometimes, nobody claims a body at all. MPD’s release this week advised that a body not claimed “in a reasonable amount of time” is cremated.
Lum Ho acknowledged that a “reasonable amount of time” varies case-by-case — in the case of Mark Reese, more than two years has been reasonable.
However, MPD announced in June that it had five unclaimed bodies in storage. None of them were claimed by next-of-kin, Lum Ho said; four months later, none of them were included in MPD’s October list of names.
Evangelista said subsequent handling of corpses is carried out by a contractor — in HPD’s case, Clinical Labs of Hawai‘i.
State law dictates that all unclaimed dead human bodies are cremated, with the Department of Human Services paying the cost of the service — or $800, whichever is less — to the licensed crematory contracted for said service.
Said law also notes that county medical examiners have no time limit by which to submit written determinations that a body is unclaimed.
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