LODI, Calif. — Police were investigating after a contractor for a California funeral home inadvertently tossed the body of a stillborn baby into the trash, officials said.
Employees at Cherokee Memorial Funeral Home in Lodi contacted authorities on Saturday after discovering the body was missing from storage, police said in a statement Monday.
Investigators reviewed surveillance video from the facility and “discovered that an employee from a contracted transport service discarded an item containing the fetus into a waste container” two weeks earlier, the Lodi police statement said.
The body could not be retrieved because all waste containers at the funeral home had been taken by a collection company, the statement said. A search of a landfill came up empty, police said.
Mari Jo Planas and Everardo Munoz told the Northern California news station KCRA 3 that their daughter, Amiliana-Rose Navarro Romero, was at the funeral home after she was stillborn in June.
“I just want her,” Planas told the station, fighting back tears. “As a mom, you want to protect all your kids, and this is my first daughter, and I couldn't even have her alive. Now, I couldn't even have her as a whole.”
Romero’s body has still not been found – and Munoz told KCRA he is heartbroken he cannot lay her to rest yet.
“I don’t have her alive. I don’t even have her, like passed away, as her body,” Munoz said. “I don’t have anywhere to go to talk to her, to see her, and that’s the hardest thing is just I have nothing.”
“I don’t wish upon this pain for anyone else, because no one should be going through this pain like this,” Planas told the station.
The investigation will be forwarded to the San Joaquin District Attorney’s Office to determine if any criminal charges will be filed, officials said.
Tori Monforte, general manager of the funeral home, told the Los Angeles Times that mortuary officials could not provide details on the case, including the name of the employee, because of the ongoing investigation.
“We are working closely with the family, law enforcement and others involved to investigate the incident and resolve the issue quickly,” she said in an email.