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Thursday, Jun 17, 2010 12:03 AM UTC

Funeral home accused in Arlington probe fined $50,000

Spokesperson says paying the money is not an admission of guilt

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Topics: Arlington National Cemetery Investigation,

A Virginia funeral home accused of mishandling bodies awaiting burial at Arlington National Cemetery has been fined $50,000.

The Virginia Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers and National Funeral Home signed a consent order Monday. National agreed to the fine, two years probation and a half-dozen unannounced inspections per year.

A spokeswoman for Service Corporation International, the funeral home’s parent company, says the agreement is not an admission of guilt. She says it’s a way to settle the issue.

A former employee had accused the Falls Church funeral home of storing bodies in hallways and on unrefrigerated storage racks in a garage. Funeral home officials acknowledged they stored bodies in the garage, but never for long.

More Associated Press.

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Salon began investigating burial operations at Arlington National Cemetery in the spring of 2009. In a series of reports since, then Salon has exposed cases in which officials found unknown remains in graves that were supposed to be empty, buried a service member on top of another, and discovered

an urn in a dirt landfill, only to mark it as "unknown" and quietly bury it in an isolated corner of the cemetery. The series also documented hundreds of missing headstones in one historic section of the cemetery.
In response to these and other revelations, the Army launched an investigation. In June 2010, John Metzler Jr., Arlington's superintendent, and his deputy, Thurman Higginbotham were stripped of their their authority, and Army Secretary John McHugh appointed a commission led by former Sens. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, and Max Cleland, D-Ga., to oversee the cemetery.

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