Cremated remains dumped in Arlington landfill

[babylonsister]

Cremated remains dumped in Arlington landfill
More burial mix-ups unearthed at the troubled national cemetery
By Mark Benjamin

Salon/Mark Benjamin

The headstone at grave 4791. Records say workers unexpectedly found unknown remains there while digging in what was supposed to be an empty plot.


Records at Arlington National Cemetery suggest that workers found an urn of cremated remains that had been dumped -- presumably accidentally -- in a dirt landfill, reburied those remains as an unknown soldier, and kept the whole thing quiet.

With the publication of this article, Salon has now disclosed four separate cases in which the cemetery discovered unmarked remains due to burial glitches, mostly poor record-keeping. In a fifth case, the cemetery accidentally buried the remains of one service member on top of another in the same grave. Salon's reporting has led the Army to launch an investigation of record-keeping problems at the cemetery.

Gravestones simply marked "Unknown" are easy to find scattered throughout the sprawling acres of perfectly aligned headstones at Arlington. In addition to the famous Tomb of the Unknowns, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unknown soldiers buried there, dating back to the Civil War.

These should be old graves. The cemetery interred the last soldier rendered anonymous by war back in 1984 because DNA has rapidly improved the process of identifying remains.

But a Salon investigation has turned up internal cemetery records that show that sloppy record-keeping, not the ravages of war, blurred the identities of some of those unknown soldiers at Arlington. In some cases cemetery officials lost track of the identity of remains during burial operations and simply erected an "Unknown" headstone above those graves when they could not straighten it out.

more...

http://www.salon.com/news/arlington_national_cemetary_investigation/index.html?story=/news/feature/2009/12/10/arlington

[HopeHoops]

1. It would really mess them up if someone legally changed their name to "Unknown Soldier".

Frankly, I don't know how they figured out who the first soldiers were. When they decided to use the Lee estate as a cemetery, they were sitting on a substantial number of dead Union soldiers. I wonder how many had some form of identification on them.