Word: harbors
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...business is gruesome enough: an assembly-line crematorium that makes up in volume what it cuts in price. But Harbor Lawn Mount Olive Mortuary, Cemetery and Crematory in Costa Mesa, Calif., is accused of even grislier practices. To handle its backlog of bodies, former employees claim, the mortuary crammed corpses five at a time into gas ovens built for one. The jumbled ashes were allegedly dumped into 30-gal. trash cans. Then, says Bob Kilburn, a funeral refrigeration-supply manufacturer who installed a cooler at Harbor Lawn three years ago, "they'd scoop up ashes with a pail...
Relatives of the deceased are not amused. Charging fraud, some 300 outraged customers are each seeking $3 million in damages from Harbor Lawn. Its chief supplier of corpses, the Neptune Society, a sea-burial service, is also named in the suits, along with more than ten local mortuaries that contracted out to Harbor Lawn...
...first complaints about Harbor Lawn came three years ago, when Audrey Cooper, 72, received a burial urn containing what she thought was the ashes of her husband William. A family friend named Jerry Read, who had once worked for Harbor Lawn but quit in disgust, told the widow that the remains were not her husband's. Says Read: "Bodies were doubled up on shelves in the refrigerator. When they got full, they'd stack the bodies on the garage floor and leave them there for days." Read and other former employees further charge that bins full of excess...
...lawsuits tackle two of California's wealthiest and most prolific body-disposal entrepreneurs, John Dillan Flanagan, 67, whose Harbor Lawn charnel house handled almost one-half of Orange County cremations in 1981, and Charles Denning, 53, founder of the Neptune Society. Flanagan's lawyer claims that his client is an absentee owner who "wouldn't know how to operate a mortuary." Yet Millionaire Flanagan seemed to know plenty about the business's bottom line. In 1961 he was convicted of grossly overcharging the Veterans Administration for frill-free funerals. He was sentenced to two years...
Betty McMullen and Melvin Belli, the plaintiffs' principal attorneys, urged their clients to form a Dignity After Death Society; the group's tearful demonstrations outside Harbor Lawn have generated morbid interest. The two lawyers also placed ads in the Santa Ana Register in Orange County, looking for others with loved ones who were cremated at Harbor Lawn...