Battleangel

This is the great America, where the unclaimed dead piles up and gets thrown in virtually unmarked graves. En masse.

Sploid - Services were held last week for 1,619 men and women cremated and buried in a mass grave by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. All of them died in 2001 and not one of them was claimed by a loved one for proper burial.

About one-tenth of them were never identified. Some were left because they had no known family and some families were unaware. Most were left by families too broke to be able to afford the cost of a funeral.

Last year’s ceremony was for 1,606 unclaimed people. Some years the number exceeds 2,000. The coronoer’s office keeps a website with the names of almost 4,000 unclaimed dead.

Los Angeles County cremates unclaimed bodies and keeps the ashes in small plastic bags for four years before the burying them. In lieu of a traditional headstone, the graves are marked with a metal plaque bearing the tracking numbers for each person.

Being the most populous county in the US, of course there will be a certain piling up of dead people, claimed or not. But what does it say about the US, when they still in 2005 shovel people into paupers’ graves. The America where a burial goes for thousands of dollars and where all people can really afford is a metal plaque and a slot in a mass grave.