HOLLY, Mich. (WXYZ) – A Michigan widow is suing a funeral home that she claims stored her husband’s ashes for nearly 30 years without notice.
For years, 85-year-old Daisy Marshall believed the ashes of her husband, Charles, were safe in an urn at her home. Now, she’s not sure whose remains she’s been keeping.
“Where had those ashes been for all that time and whose ashes did I have?” Marshall said.
The mother and grandmother was making prearrangements at Great Lakes National Cemetery back in 2022. She wanted to be cremated and interred with her husband, an Air Force veteran. That’s when cemetery staffers delivered devastating news.
“They told me that somebody was interred under my husband’s ID already, and the ashes had been delivered there in December of 2018,” Marshall said.
She had previously believed she received all of her husband’s remains at his memorial service in 1991, which was conducted by Wilson-Akins Funeral Homes. The funeral home is now involved in an ongoing legal dispute with Marshall over the handling of her husband’s ashes.
An attorney representing the funeral home claims Marshall requested only a portion of her husband’s ashes and that the rest be stored at the facility for her to pick up. The lawyer says she never did, and those cremains remained there for 27 years.
Marshall disputes this account entirely.
“That conversation never happened. It never happened. Even if the conversation had taken place, I was supposed to be given, according to what I’ve read, some written communication to pick those ashes up,” she said.
The state ordered the funeral home to give a proper final disposition to all of their unclaimed cremains in 2018, at which point they were sent to Great Lakes National Cemetery.
Marshall discovered this by chance four years later, leaving her shocked and in disbelief. She is now pursuing a lawsuit, hoping to ensure no one else has the same experience that she and, allegedly, other families endured.
“Three other veterans’ ashes were interred there – or stored there, I should say. Two of those veterans had been there over 31 years and one, over 10 years,” Marshall said.
The state’s Mortuary Science Unit investigated the matter and cleared the funeral home of any wrongdoing.