COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Half a dozen agencies have joined the investigation into a burned Cobb County funeral home after a photographer from England found urns, bags of human ashes, and even human remains in what is left of the building.
Norman Medford Peden Funeral Home and Crematory caught fire earlier this year.
Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell has learned six agencies are now involved in figuring out what was happening inside the funeral home, including Marietta police, Cobb County Fire and Emergency Services, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, the Cobb County Medical Examiner’s Office and the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
They say they are looking for family members who used Norman Medford Peden Funeral Home and Crematory for their loved one’s burial or cremation. If that’s you, they ask you to contact them here.
“We are trying to find out where that money is,” Noula Zaharia with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office Cemeteries Divison said of the thousands of dollars many families pre-paid for funerals.
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Newell first told you about what Ben James found in the building on Wednesday.
“Bank statements of burials, bank statements of people who had paid for burials. I’ve found lots of ashes at funeral homes, maybe one or two, but to find this amount was crazy, I’ve never seen such a big amount,” James said. “It was very alarming.”
James said he found more than 30 urns and bags of human ashes. Some were labeled with names, others weren’t.
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He told Newell that there were family photos, death certificates, credit card information, and even hazardous chemicals.
“There was a discarded human fetus in a jar just left in the embalming room. What’s the back story to it? How can that just been forgotten about? It’s very sad,” James said.
The building was up for a foreclosure auction before the fire happened. The cause of the fire is undetermined. The building is set to be demolished.
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