A Florida funeral home director has been arrested and charged with grand theft and improper handling of human remains after he allegedly abandoned three bodies in his Jacksonville funeral home and handed out cremains that family members said looked like “chalk or ground kitty litter.”
Elliott Maurice Graham, 59, was arrested on Friday in Orlando and is behind bars at the Orange County Jail awaiting transfer back to Jacksonville.
State agents were at his Marion Graham Mortuaries building on Thursday, when they found three bodies inside. One of them belonged to Pauline Durden, whose family told WJXT that they thought they had laid her ashes to rest six months ago.
“It was heartbreaking,” Nairobia Durden said. “Just the journey of everything, it’s been tough trying to heal. And just when you think you get to a point where it’s like, it’s starting to feel a little bit better. It’s the wound that’s been reopened.”
Durden said detectives took the ashes to test them and find out who — or what — they really are.
Other families members reported unusual interactions with Graham, who took over the mortuary after his father died in 2018.
Takenya Sutton and Danielle Streater told WJXT that they suspect their cousin was embalmed improperly — if at all — for the funeral last March.
“It was an unforgettable smell, basically it was the smell of a decomposing body,” Steater said.
And Taslesa Ware said she suspected something similar when Graham refused to let them have an open casket wake when her father died in November 2022. The burial, she said, happened days after the funeral because Graham didn’t contact the cemetery to dig the grave, and the wake was three hours later.
“Finally, we were told that he was not viewable, so we had to have a closed casket,” Ware said.
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[Featured image: Elliott Maurice Graham/Orange County Sheriff’s Office]
