Bill would require USC to exhume couple's ashes

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Arthur Weeden says the University of South Carolina promised his parents if they donated their bodies to the university's medical school, their cremated remains would get a proper burial.

Years after their deaths in the mid 1980s, Weeden found out the university mixed the ashes of the school's longtime employees with an unknown number of other donors in a field where the unclaimed remains of executed convicts also lay.

Weeden tried to sue the school, but the suit was tossed out. Now he has persuaded lawmakers to pass a bill in the state Senate requiring the university to exhume a sampling of the ashes and place them in a memorial garden at the medical school.

Senators gave the bill preliminary second reading approval on Tuesday. Sen. Jake Knotts, R-West Columbia, said he introduced it after Arthur Weeden came to see him.

"These people donated their bodies to science, and they need a decent burial place," Knotts said.

Current university officials have said they don't know why the remains were commingled or why they were buried in the prison cemetery. The school has announced it was establishing a memorial garden where the ashes of all body donors, past and future, would be interred.

"We've had the garden there for four years, kind of sitting there waiting," said university spokesman Russ McKinney. "The problem has been that under the current law, we've been prohibited from moving any of the cremains unless we could move them all, and to move them all, we would have to receive permission from all the families. In all honesty, we don't think we could even identify all the families."

But Weeden decided to go to lawmakers after the university still hadn't taken action early this year.

It took Weeden years after his parents' death before school officials were able to tell him where the ashes were buried.

"We have no idea what they were buried in. Was it a cigar box, was it a 55-gallon drum?" Weeden said. "We have no idea what can be recovered."

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Information from: The Charlotte Observer, http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/