County Is Last Friend Left in World for Unclaimed

Two hundred ash-filled plastic urns. One unmarked grave.

This is how the county’s destitute or unclaimed are buried.

The tab is $290, picked up by county taxpayers and handled by the county public administrator.

“Somebody has to care for the burial,” said Harold S. Pittman, Ventura County’s treasurer, tax collector and public administrator. “In the absence of any family, the public administrator is the only person legally authorized to sign a burial or cremation order.”

The county handles about 50 such deaths a year. They are the transient found dead on the park bench; the wealthy recluse who outlived his relatives and died without a will; the elderly woman who lived alone and died alone. All are cremated and anonymously lumped together for eternity.

“Everybody dies, but it is better to be in a position where family can help with your burial,” Assistant Public Administrator Michael H. Jacobsen said. “A lot of people don’t have that luxury. But the one thing they can be sure of is that they will be taken care of.”

The public administrator also handles all the financial affairs of the deceased, including bank accounts, insurance policies and debts.

Personal belongings, if there are any, are cataloged and taken to a cavernous county storage shed in Ventura.

“Everybody has stuff. It’s amazing how much people can accumulate,” Jacobsen said. “Somebody has to deal with all the stuff, and that’s us.”

About three times a year, the objects of several people’s material lives--televisions, shoes, cars, pots and pans--are publicly auctioned. The money goes toward settling debts, and the remainder fills state coffers if a relative can’t be found.

“You get to know a lot about a person in this business, sometimes more than the family,” Deputy Public Administrator Mark Roady said recently as he stood in the county warehouse.

“This was a one-bedroom apartment,” he said pointing to an eclectic collection of objects stacked against a wall. “This is everything.”

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Old photos and letters are held for about five years and then tossed in the garbage if no one claims them.

“I have no qualms about selling a couch, but throwing out a family Bible when no family can be found--that’s difficult,” Roady said.

The call to the public administrator’s office usually comes from the medical examiner’s office: dead body, can’t locate next of kin.

Jacobsen and Roady make arrangements for a mortuary to care for the corpse and make another effort to locate a living relative.

Good friends aren’t good enough. Unless a will specifically instructs that a friend orchestrate the burial, the body still ends up in the public administrator’s hands.

In some cases, a relative is found but wants nothing to do with the deceased. Other times, the relative can’t afford burial.

One time, a body was cremated and a surviving wife claimed the ashes. She took the urn, then left it in a Ventura bus station. It remained there, in the lost and found, for about eight years until it was returned to the county for burial.

Occasionally, a body can’t be identified and a Jane or John Doe is thrown into the mortal mix.

The corpses used to be buried in separate coffins, but the county switched to cremation in 1981 because it’s cheaper.

After the cremation, the small box of remains is placed in an unmarked, communal crypt at Ventura’s Ivy Lawn Memorial Park. It takes about three or four years for enough boxes to collect to warrant a mass burial beneath Ivy Lawn’s expansive sod.

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When it is time for burial, a groundskeeper using a backhoe spends about an hour digging a double-deep hole to accommodate two coffin-sized concrete vaults--each containing about 100 remains tightly packed side by side.

A hoist lowers the heavy vaults. There is no ceremony, no prayer read, and no spectators. The grave is filled in and left without a marker of any sort. It blends in with the rest of the lawn.

Few mourners make their way to Ventura County’s pauper graves. There are no flowers.

“Visitors are rare, very rare, if at all,” cemetery President Linda Loftis said.

“It is sad,” Loftis added. “They each had a name, a life, and somebody who cared for them--whether it was a sister, brother or uncle. But now these somebodies can’t be found.

“When no one remembers you, it is as if you never existed.”