Woman receives wrong ashes from Chicago crematory after waiting over 2 years
A suburban woman was forced to wait over two years to get her mother's remains from a south suburban crematory that has since been shut down by the State of Illinois for allegations of mishandled bodies. All that Wren Williams has left of her mother and father
By Dave Savini, Michele Youngerman
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — A suburban woman was forced to wait over two years to get her mother’s remains from a south suburban crematory that has since been shut down by the State of Illinois for allegations of mishandled bodies.
All that Wren Williams has left of her mother and father, Paul and Betty Williams of Highland Park are two plastic bags of ashes. Both were supposed to be cremated at Heights Crematory in Chicago Heights.
“I sent my mom to Heights because that’s where she had my dad cremated in 2011 when he passed away,” she said. She wanted her mother to be in the same place as him.
Betty Williams died in 2020, but Wren can’t understand why her father’s bag of ashes is over 1 pound lighter and smaller than her mother’s, especially since he outweighed her by 60 pounds.
Wren talked with the CBS News Chicago Investigators about the discrepancy after seeing our series of investigative reports exposing how Heights and its operator Clark Morgan are accused of mishandling bodies.
Since February, Morgan has refused to talk to us about images of bodies stacked in plastic and body parts exposed in the dirty trailer on his property.
Morgan is also accused of failing to process cremations in a timely manner. Bodies were found waiting to be cremated for months; one man found in the trailer had been dead an entire year.
“I just felt that it was complete neglect,” Williams said.
Williams also had to wait for her mother’s remains, despite continuously arguing with Morgan and his staff over the phone.
“I would call them and they would say they’d call me back, and they would never call me back,” she said.
Ultimately, she had to wait two and a half years before she got her mother’s ashes. She had to file an official complaint with the state to get the bag and an urn. She said Morgan never even got in trouble for making her wait so long, and now she wonders if her mom was just tossed in a trailer, too.
“That’s all I can see, and I’m trying to, trying to place my mother somewhere in that chaos,” she said.
For years, Morgan has gotten away with multiple slaps on the wrist by multiple state agencies for mounting violations, but his crematory just kept running. Williams says that’s all indicative of a lack of oversight.
“Somebody has to be held accountable,” she said.
It got even worse when a state investigator asked her to dump out and dig through her mother’s ashes to look for a crucial piece of evidence: a metal identification tag.
Each bag of cremated remains contains a metal tag with a log number on it, which is meant to match the person cremated. Betty Williams’ tag did not match.
“Not my mom’s log number,” Williams said. “They couldn’t even find her in the log.”
And that led Williams to a painful but unavoidable conclusion.
“I don’t have my mom, no,” she said. “[The ashes] belong to somebody else, another family.”
“It triggers an immense sense of emotional distress and trauma,” said attorney Jonathan Treshansky.
Treshansky is filing a lawsuit against Heights Crematory on behalf of Wren Williams and her family.
“To this day, nobody knows where her mom’s body is or where her remains are,” he said. “Nobody.”
Meanwhile, Williams is left feeling helpless.
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