What happens to dead nobody mourns?
They are the unnamed, the unclaimed and the unmourned.
They are what the police usually (and conveniently) describe as “salvage victims”: Bodies dumped on sidewalks or trash heaps, stuffed in sacks or balikbayan boxes.
They often merit a screaming headline in the papers, depending on the gory details. But with the investigators having little or no clues to work on, their cases are quickly consigned to the archives. And from there, they are all but forgotten.
But what really happens to the unidentified crime victims after their bodies are kept for days, weeks or even months in the morgue?
For one, they can still get a decent burial. “They have no loved ones to bury them, so we make it our duty to lay them to rest even if it costs us,” said an owner of a funeral parlor based in Quezon City.
The funeral home is one of the few tasked by the Quezon City Police District with the temporary safekeeping of corpses involved in crimes (or accidents) until the family claims the body.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the funeral home owner said 15 to 20 percent of the cadavers they get from the police each month are unclaimed.
The company still gets to spend for these corpses at around P35,000 each. “That’s already a big chunk of income lost. Just one or two unclaimed bodies already mean a lot of money,” the proprietor said.
An embalmed cadaver is usually kept in a cold morgue for a week, after which it joins other bodies in a “swimming pool.”
Instead of water, however, this pool is filled with formaldehyde or formalin, which is used in embalming.
“The bodies stay in the pool for one to two months. If it is still unclaimed, we wrap the body tightly, like a mummy, and place it in storage boxes until someone claims it,” the owner said.
However, funeral homes keep bodies for only five months, after which they are buried in public cemeteries.
Just this month, the QC-based funeral-home owner ordered 15 cadavers buried at a cemetery in Antipolo City. In April, 18 bodies were interred at Manila North Cemetery.
The bodies are usually buried together without coffins, either in a huge pit or apartment-type tombs.
Keeping a cadaver in storage does not come cheap at P100 per day—but funeral homes usually have some money set aside in cases of unclaimed corpses.
Burying an unclaimed corpse usually costs a company around P2,500.
The owner said, “I’ve been approached a couple of times about making money off unclaimed cadavers” by selling them to medical schools. “But I think it is just wrong, even if it means getting back lost income.”
“These are dead people and they deserve respect,” the owner said, adding that the going rates for corpses sold to medical schools range from P10,000 to P40,000 per body.
Some smaller funeral parlors, the owner claimed, engage in this practice wherein the cadavers are eventually buried after being studied by medical students.
“Unclaimed bodies deserve to be treated with dignity. They have no families to bury them, so they should not be deprived of a proper burial at the end,” the owner added.
