No respect for the dead

The Daily News has this by Vinny Vella about a local idiot:

Alfreda Johnson packed a lot of heartbreak into three years. Her mother died in 1999, followed a year later by her aunt. Then, she buried her father in March of 2001.
Through it all, Janet Powell Dailey was a source of comfort. "She was hands-on during the grieving process, and she checked up on me afterward," Johnson said last night. "I was more than satisfied with that funeral home."
Johnson didn't pick Powell Mortuary Services, on 27th Street near Cumberland in North Philly; her parents did. They made her promise to use Dailey's business, a neighborhood standby trusted for generations. At one time, Johnson said, every funeral she attended for a relative or friend was conducted by Powell.
So she was stunned yesterday upon hearing that police had pulled three rotting corpses entrusted to the funeral home from a nearby garage that once hosted parties for a motorcycle club.
It remained unclear last night why the bodies were being stored there, or for how long. Dailey's son told the Daily News that they were placed in the garage, which he owns, yesterday morning, a temporary stop on the way to the crematorium. But police sources said Dailey herself told them a slightly different tale.
Police were drawn to the garage, on Hagert Street near 27th, just before 11 am yesterday after a resident found the bodies while investigating what he said was a foul stench wafting from the property.
Corey Cureton, 37, said the first red flag was the garage door, left wide open.
Then the smell hit him, "a pungent odor" that the humid summer air carried across the street to his front porch. It smelled, he said, like death.
Cureton peeked into the dark garage. Near the door, he found a long, wide cardboard box. The smell was strongest there. He lifted the lid and confirmed his earlier suspicion: a decaying body was packed inside. He called 9111 and watched, shielding his nose and mouth, as investigators flocked to the scene. He said a paramedic later told him that one of the bodies, lying in a casket, was covered in flies and maggots. Cureton said that he knows Dailey to be a "good woman". But he was at a loss to explain what he found in that garage. "Now, she has to figure out what to say to the families of those people," he said last night.
That's not all Dailey will have to explain. State records show that Powell Mortuary Services is not currently a licensed funeral home, having let its certification lapse in 2012. Dailey herself is a licensed funeral director and supervisor, the records show.
Her son, Chris Dailey, last night characterized the incident as a misunderstanding and defended the business, which has been in his family for decades. "It's a sad situation for someone who's stayed in the community, when so many other businesses have left," he said. Dailey said the funeral home on 27th Street has been closed for months and is being renovated. In the interim, he said, bodies are being stored at Price Funeral Home, on 43rd Street near Wallace in West Philadelphia. No one answered the phone at Price last night.
According to Dailey, space at Price is tight, and he was expecting more bodies yesterday morning, the same day that the three bodies found in the garage were set to be cremated at Ivy Hill Cemetery in East Mount Airy.
Dailey dropped the bodies off at 9 am yesterday, leaving them in the garage, a space he normally uses to store caskets and other supplies, while he went to pick up the new bodies. His plan, he said, was to come back later and take the bodies to Ivy Hill.
The bodies were so badly decomposed, Dailey said, because he had no refrigerated space in which to store them. Two hours after leaving North Philadelphia, his cellphone was flooded with calls from people demanding to know why police were congregating at his garage.
The property has had a colorful past, Dailey said, including a stint as a clubhouse for the Twisters, a motorcycle club. Yesterday was the first time he stored bodies there, he said, calling it a "spur-of-the-moment decision."
Dailey's version of what happened doesn't quite mesh with what his mother told detectives, according to one law-enforcement source. During questioning yesterday, Janet Powell Dailey said she moved the bodies to the garage on Monday, when their odor became too much to handle at the funeral home on 27th Street, according to the source.
Another police source said the bodies allegedly came into Dailey's care from two nursing homes. All three individuals were elderly and appeared to have been dead for an extended period of time.
Dailey had not been charged with a crime as of last night, but the probe into her business was far from over.
Public records suggest a history of financial problems at Powell. City property records show the funeral home's 27th Street property has an outstanding tax bill of more than $17,500. Court records show the funeral home has been named as a defendant in more than forty cases, dating back to the 1980s.
The filings include a foreclosure; liens by the IRS, the state revenue department, the city of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia school district; as well as efforts to recoup money owed to a South Jersey burial vault company, a Pittsburgh casket company and a car-loan company.
Meanwhile, some former clients were starting to second-guess their dealings with Dailey. "Even though it's been years since my parents died, this raises questions if things were handled properly," said Lynne Perkins-Watson, who patronized Powell Mortuary Services for both her parents' funerals, as well as for the cremation of her aunt. "I didn't have any complaints about them at the time, but now I'm concerned: Was my aunt cremated properly?"

Rico says this will go on for years...