Mr. Donald Anderson died in October 2007. As an “indigent decedent,” Beaver County cremated him at taxpayer expense as required by law and wrote his name in a coroner’s office ledger. For nearly 19 years, nobody outside a very small handful of people in county government knew anything more about what happened to him next. Then a county employee picked up the phone.
That call, placed to BeaverCountian.com several weeks ago, wasn’t about just Mr. Anderson. It was a tip about cremated human remains that had been found mixed in with dog license paperwork at a document storage facility in Wampum used by the county. This publication’s reporting about that discovery — and on the county’s subsequent decision to quietly relocate the remains to a room down the hall from WBVP Radio’s broadcasting booth — led BeaverCountian.com to file a right-to-know request for the names of everyone the county was storing.
The county finally responded to that request this week, in the form of nine coroner’s office ledgers labeled “Bin 1” through “Bin 9” — a log of every unclaimed cremated decedent going back nearly two decades.
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