NOBLE, Ga. — Georgia state officials said Wednesday that at least eight months and a "staggering" amount of money will be necessary to recover and to identify the hundreds of bodies that they expect to find at Tri-State Crematory.
The cost will include draining a 12- to-15-acre lake on the crematory grounds, where officials have said an underwater camera found a torso and a skull submerged about 20 yards from the shoreline.
Gary McConnell, director of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, warned yesterday that the financial burden to taxpayers will be steep.
He said the first five days of the investigation already have cost the state about $5 million — or $1 million per day in equipment rental, hotel rooms and overtime pay for the 500 employees on the Tri-State Crematory case.
The labor-intensive work of digging up and identifying the bodies will require a "long-term" commitment of at least eight months, said McConnell, who compared the task to the agency's assignment of identifying and returning 474 bodies washed out of cemeteries during the 1994 floods in Albany, Ga.
"I assure you, we're a very expensive operation," McConnell said. "The cost is going to be staggering."
He declined to give an estimate until after he meets with Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes today to talk about the scope of the operation but vowed it would include draining the lake.
The investigation so far has involved a massive canvass of the 16-acre grounds and the nearby home of crematory operator Brent Marsh. So far, law-enforcement officials have recovered 242 corpses — a number certain to rise as authorities continue to open six steel vaults that they say are crammed with bodies.
Marsh, 28, remains at Walker County Jail on a suicide watch and has waived his right for a speedy arraignment while he looks for an attorney, say officials. District Attorney Herbert "Buzz" Franklin said that he intends to charge Marsh — already facing 16 counts of felony theft — with additional violations for every body that is identified.
Aggrieved families, though, are seeking civil recourse. At least two class-action lawsuits have been filed this week, and a third lawsuit is expected today.
A lawsuit filed Tuesday in Cleveland, Tenn. seeks $100 million from Marsh and Tri-State Crematory for the "depravity" of having failed to cremate the body of a local woman who died in November 2000.
The other lawsuit, filed yesterday in LaFayette, Ga., asks unspecified damages; LaFayette is the seat of Walker County, where the crematory had operated. The suit alleges that Marsh returned containers with "ashes, sticks, insects, sand, gravel, ground masonry particles and other things" to four people who paid $1,020 for the cremation of their loved ones.
Both lawsuits also name Cleveland-based Buckner-Rush funeral homes, which contracted the cremations to Tri-State Crematory; and Prime Succession Holdings Inc., the parent company. Both establishments were named as co-defendants for having failed to ensure that cremations were performed.
Tests have identified 35 of the bodies and have revealed that 29 families received urns "adulterated" by foreign materials, such as cement dust — or the ashes of someone other than their dead relatives.
