By The River

Back to my old hometown today. The family of Erwin Jordan, the man whose remains were taken by mistake to a landfill in the Holland-Zeeland area and buried with the trash has finally settled their civil lawsuit against the parties responsible. No details, of course, but the family is said to be pleased with the damages they received.

This has spawned a host of damning comments in the Holland Sentinel from the folks who believe any time a blue collar family receives damages from a corporation it must somehow be undeserved. If you're poor, I guess you're just supposed to take whatever the big boys hand out and not complain.

Jordan's body was kept in a cold garage at the Notier-Verlee-Langeland Funeral Home on 16th Street in Holland pending a decision by the family whether to bury or cremate him. Priority Arrowaste, which appears to have employed mainly morons, thought the body (in a cardboard box) was trash and tossed it in the truck. It ended up in Waste Management, Inc.'s Auburn Hills landfill in Zeeland Twp.

The Jordan family, being from the other side of the economic tracks, then got the bum's rush when they complained and demanded their father's body be dug out of the landfill for a proper burial. The landfill conducted a desultory search but failed to find Jordan's body. Amazingly, the state of Michigan did not require them to keep searching. While this may sound like one of those needle-in-a-haystack situations, the police out East have a good record of finding crime victim bodies in landfills. It costs money--there's the rub--but it can be done.

To continue this awful story, Ottawa County Circuit Judge Jon Van Allsburg, the sort of judge beloved by rightwing conservatives, ruled that the Jordan family couldn't sue for emotional distress because they didn't personally witness their father's body being dumped in the landfill. Van Allsburg is the sort of judge who can always find a loophole to prevent well-lawyered corporations from being held to to account for their misdeeds.

I'm glad the responsible parties finally settled this case, and I would love to know the cost to their bottom line of this foolish and reprehensible episode. Jordan's body remains in the Auburn Hills landfill, sharing space with tin cans and soda bottles and who knows what else. He deserved far better than he got.

Posted by David at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Call me obsessed, but I can't get enough of the story, now two years-old, of how a man's body was accidentally picked up by a trash hauler at a funeral home in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and then dumped in the nearby Auburn Hills landfill owned by Waste Management. Where amazingly, he remains (can you think of a better word?) to this day.

The latest, as reported by the Holland Sentinel, is that officials from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth have reopened their file in the case after meeting with lawyers for Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home, Priority Arrowaste, and the family of the man in the landfill, Erwin Jordan. Funeral homes are among the businesses regulated by the department.

Now I'm a newspaper reporter, and as a group, we have a pretty dark sense of humor. It's sort of a technique for mentally coping with the murder, mayhem and other tragedies we write about on a regular basis. We'll yuck it up over weird suicides, odd accidents, and (most recently) the local woman who tried to strangle her boyfriend with her bra (underwire? Victoria's Secret?). Which segued into a discussion among the photographers over whether, if you were going to kill someone, would you want them naked or clothed?

But I struggle to find even the blackest of humor in the Erwin Jordan case, although I'll forgive you if you do. What sort of society leaves a human being's body in a landfill rather than inconvenience either the landfill owner or the taxpayers with the effort of finding it? Especially when the costs can logically be charged back to the idiots who put our Mr. Jordan there to begin with.

Hairsplitting legalities aside, find the body. If the FBI can find crime victims in Pennsylvania landfills, there is no reason what is left of Erwin Jordan can't be found and given a proper burial.

Posted by David at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unlike in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, where a search for a human body accidentally picked up as trash at a local funeral home and dumped in a landfill was called off quickly, this Downingtown family kept at it until they found their mother's missing jewelry. I guess when you're motivated, anything is possible.

Posted by David at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Judge Jon Van Allsburg in Ottawa County, Michigan, now joins the ranks of those distinguished jurists who manage to ignore the obvious while making certain that well-lawyered corporations don't have to face up to the full consequences of their actions. I've written about this case before, and it just gets worse and worse.

Van Allsburg ruled yesterday that the family of Erwin Jordan can't sue for emotional distress in the outrageous incident in which Jordan's body was left in a box in a garage by Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, picked up by a trash hauler, Priority Arrowaste,and subsequently dumped in Waste Management, Inc.,'s Auburn Hills landfill in Zeeland Twp., where it remains today. The reason? Because the family didn't "witness" the body being dumped in the landfill and didn't learn of the incident until more than a day later. It wasn't enough that they must go on living knowing that their family member was dumped in the trash.

That the body remains in the landfill is outrageous and shocks the conscience. Neither VanAllsburg nor anyone else with authority over the situation should have allowed Waste Management to leave it there. Costly to look for it? Sure. But that's what insurance and deep corporate pockets are for. That's what a civilized society does.

VanAllsburg has allowed a lawsuit to proceed against Priority Arrowaste on the narrow ground of whether its employees should have known that the box contained human remains. But given how this case has gone so far, and given that the Jordan family is from the Holland area's blue collar fringe and has no position and influence in the community, I'm not holding my breath that they'll ever get justice in this sad and horrific case.

Huh? So the mere fact that a loved one's body has been dumped in a landfill instead of being laid to rest in cemetery or cremated isn't enough? Van Allsburg has already excused Priority Arrowaste from liability on the grounds that Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home placed the remains in a storage box too close to a refuse container, thus violating some arcane provision of its "contract" with the waste hauler.

Posted by David at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the more bizarre and disturbing stories to come out of my hometown of Holland, Michigan, in recent years had to do with a lost corpse. It is a story with elements of black humor, but which ultimately shocks the conscience.

Here's what happened: Erwin Jordan, 66, an average working man, but descended from Holland's original Dutch settlers, dies Dec. 20, 2005. What with the holidays and all, his children can't decide whether to bury or cremate him. The body is at the Notier-Ver Lee-Langeland Funeral Home in Holland. The funeral home, which has been there forever (my grandfather was buried from it), put the corpse in a black body bag inside a white cardboard cremation box to await their decision. Since its refrigeration units are all in use, they put the box in the unheated funeral home garage (Big Mistake #1)

After the holidays, the kids, who seem a bit dysfunctional, still can't decide. One day, Jan. 6, 2006, to be exact, along comes a truck from Priority Arrowaste, the regular trash hauler used by the funeral home. The dim-bulb crew sees the white box, which weighed 70 pounds, and according to testimony in the lawsuit, thinks it contains used rags (Big Mistake #2). A worker picks up the box to put it in the truck. It breaks, and the body bag tumbles out. He picks it up--that must have been easy--and throws it in a dumpster (Big Mistake #3), which is then emptied into the truck.

Off goes the truck to the Auburn Hills Landfill (did it used to be a subdivision?) operated by Waste Management, Inc., in Zeeland Twp. Erwin Jordan's body is dumped in the landfill along with whatever else is in the truck (Big Mistake #4). Seventy other truckloads of garbage are dumped on top of him before the mistake is discovered later that day. The police go to the landfill with cadaver dogs on Jan. 7-8, 2006, but can't find the body.

Now things really get strange. The search never resumes. Police determine that no crime has been committed, so they have no obligation to find the body. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, after initially insisting that the body must be found and removed from the landfill, change their mind. They determine that it is only against the law to dump medical waste in a landfill, i.e., body parts. Since Jordan's body is intact, voila! No law has been violated! The Jordan kids say they don't want the search to continue, either. Only Jordan's brother, Stuart, issues a plaintive plea to find his brother Erwin. The Holland Sentinel publishes an editorial headlined "Find the Body."

Guess what? Erwin Jordan is still in the landfill. This was no Law & Order landfill search, where they keep digging till they find the body (that does happen in real life, by the way, usually when someone offed in New York is suspected to be in a landfill in Pennsylvania). A county judge should have ordered the search to continue, and hang the cost. That's what insurance is for. Inconvenience to business or bureaucrats is not a legitimate excuse. Where were Holland's many pro-life clergy? The whole episode shocks the conscience.

This past Friday, the various parties squared off in a Michigan courtroom for the opening rounds of the litigation. Notier-VerLee-Langeland and Priority Arrowaste, which appears to be the hardliner against settlement, are suing each other. The Jordan family, now united, is suing both. Where is the Pedro Almodovar of America to turn this epic into the absurdist film it cries out to be?

Posted by David at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)