USC may have to exhume ashes

COLUMBIA - 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 employees with an unknown number of donors in a field where the remains of executed convicts 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 school.

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

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. "The problem has been that under the current law, we've been prohibited from moving any of the remains 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," university spokesman Russ McKinney said.