By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – Retired Navy man Jack Lakely got a call from a friend one day who worked at Morton General Hospital.
She had a question, Lakely said.
“A gentleman she’d become friends with passed away, and she asked me, what do they do with veterans who don’t have family,” he said.
Lakely, who lives in Onalaska, started asking questions, he said. He called the Lewis County Coroner’s Office to find out who takes care of the burials for veterans who die, and have nobody left behind to handle the arrangements, he said.
He was surprised to learn the coroner’s office simply stores the cremated remains of all deceased who are not claimed.
“Come to find out, they had eight others on the shelf,” Lakely said.
The 64-year-old said he spoke with other veterans, members of his local American Legion Post and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post, about the situation.
“They were all appalled, like I was, so we ran with it,” Lakely said.
That was about a month and a half ago. Now, Lakely, Ron Keller of the Chehalis Moose Lodge, Lewis County Coroner Warren McLeod and others have joined together to make sure those nine individuals and any who come after them will get a burial with full military honors at Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent.
The Department of Veteran’s Affairs provides burial and a government headstone for veterans in a National Cemetery, under most conditions and as long as they are not dishonorably discharged, according to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
Lakely and others are working with the Kent cemetery to determine the eligibility of each of the nine, although they’re having trouble finding records for one of them, he said.
Eight are men, one is a woman.
Lakely will be handcrafting wooden urns for their each one, and will escort them to Kent, hopefully for a internment on Veteran’s Day, he said.
Coroner McLeod calls it a pilot program. They’ve named it “Operation at Ease” he said today.
“I think it’s great,” McLeod said. “We’ve had vets stopping by all week saying they’d heard about it, and how can they help.”
As it turns out, when McLeod took over the office in January, he found about 25 unclaimed sets of cremated remains being stored, he said.
Under the law, when any person dies without any family to make arrangements, their body is held for 30 days as the coroner attempts to find any relatives, he said.
After that, they are cremated, and stored at the coroner’s office, in case family eventually comes forward, he said. The people they have now go back many years, he said.
Some jurisdictions, instead of keeping them on a shelf indefinitely, have arrangements with local cemeteries, like a “Potters Field”, McLeod said.
But Lewis County does not, McLeod discovered.
He’s exploring ways to get all those people into a cemetery, he said.
“A big part of it is storage space,” he said.
But now, at least eight, or perhaps nine, of those individuals, will be taken of the shelf and placed in a cemetery.
The Chehalis Moose Lodge will be holding a fundraiser – a chicken-fried steak dinner – on Sept. 11, to help Lakely and Moose member Ron Keller, offset some of the costs involved in making that happen.
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