Nearly 200 bodies from illegal funeral home to be buried in mass grave

PHOTO by JHESSET O. ENANO/INQUIRER

Quezon City officials are set to bury on Wednesday nearly 200 bodies recovered from a funeral home that was ordered closed for violations of the sanitary and health code.

A dump truck of the city government is currently on its way to Novaliches Public Cemetery to lay the bodies retrieved from Henry Memorial Services in La Loma in a mass grave.

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Another truck is still hauling other remains discovered in the facility.

On Tuesday, authorities were shocked to come across bodies of men, women and children in different states of decomposition, wrapped in almost a hundred black plastic bags. Some remains were allegedly used by medical schools, according to health officer Verdades Linga, although reports have yet to be verified.

Henry Memorial Services was slapped with a cease and desist order last Sept. 23, but still continued to operate. It reportedly continued receiving bodies from different funeral houses for storage purposes, despite the lack of proper permits and equipment.

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The owner Oscar Parales and manager Severino Mancia were nowhere to be found.

The health department recommended a burial within 48 hours to prevent a health epidemic caused by the unsanitary facility.

Linga said this is the biggest mass grave of this manner in the history of the city, comparable only to the Payatas tragedy in 2000. RAM