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BY BOB HOLT
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Questions from a New Jersey woman whose husband died in Iraq five years ago about what happened to her husband’s remains helped lead to the exposure of an Air Force practice of dumping soldiers’ remains in a Virginia landfill.
Dover Air Force Base officials admitted to dumping partial remains and body parts of its soldiers in the landfill last month. Officials said that over 6,300 troops’ remains had gone through their mortuary since 2001, and they could not tell how many soldiers’ remains had passed through there.
According to the Washington Post, Air Force records finally showed that 976 fragments from 274 military personnel had been cremated, incinerated and sent to the Virginia landfill between 2004 and 2008. And 1,762 unidentified remains who had been too badly burned or damaged in explosions for DNA testing were sent to Virginia, and the total actually exceeded 2,700.
Frenchtown residents Gari Lynn Smith's husband, Sgt. First Class Scott Smith, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2006. Smith told NBC New York, "When I inquired about what happened to his additional remains, I figured that maybe they buried them in Arlington Cemetery. A gentleman on the phone told me no one wanted my husband so they cremated him with the rest of the medical waste and threw him in the trash."
Air Force officials say their first record of landfill disposals was on Feb. 23, 2004. According to the Atlantic Wire, the widow of an Army sergeant killed in Iraq said a mortuary official told her that remains had been taken to landfills since at least 1996.
According to the Toronto Sun, the Air Force said in a statement, "Investigators found no evidence anyone intentionally mishandled remains, but the staff was not able to ensure additional portions of remains were handled in a manner consistent with families' instructions."
The Air Force said mortuary leaders ended the landfill practice in May 2008. The military currently cremates body parts and buries their remains at sea from Navy ships.
