6 agencies investigate after a photographer says he found remains in a burned Georgia funeral home

MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) — Half a dozen state and county agencies are investigating a burned Georgia funeral home after a photographer from England said he found urns, bags of human ashes, and even human remains in what is left of the building.

Norman Medford Peden Funeral Home and Crematory in Marietta, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Atlanta, caught fire earlier this year. The building was up for a foreclosure auction before the fire happened. The cause of the fire is undetermined, and the building is set to be demolished.

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, WSB-TV reported Thursday.

They say they are looking for family members who used the business to handle their loved one’s burial or cremation.

“We are trying to find out where that money is,” Noula Zaharia with the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office Cemeteries Division said of the thousands of dollars many families prepaid for funerals.

On Wednesday, the station reported what photographer Ben James, who traveled from England to photograph the abandoned funeral home, said he found in the building.

“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. He said he also found family photos, death certificates, credit card information and hazardous chemicals.

“There was a discarded human fetus in a jar just left in the embalming room,” James said. “What’s the back story to it? How can that just have been forgotten about? It’s very sad.”

A similar situation unfolded in another Georgia city last month. A funeral home owner in Douglas, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Atlanta, was arrested and accused of neglecting human corpses after authorities said they found 18 bodies in various stages of decomposition while serving an eviction notice at the business.