Ex-Mortuary Owner May Face Charges Over Bodies Found in Carson

Authorities may charge the owner of a now-defunct chain of mortuaries with mishandling the bodies of six people--three of them victims of the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide--after the discovery of four caskets in a Carson storage facility, authorities said Wednesday.

Emmett Wardlow, former owner of Chambers-Wardlow Mortuaries in Los Angeles and Compton, apparently mishandled the bodies because of “financial insolvency,” sheriff’s spokesman Pete Fosselman said. He said the case will be presented to the district attorney’s office for a decision on whether to file misdemeanor charges of violations of state health and safety codes.

Wardlow could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The caskets were found last Saturday at the Storage-R-Us self-storage facility by the manager after the mortuary became two months behind in rent.

Three of the bodies were victims of the Jonestown mass suicide whose remains had been shipped in three caskets to Los Angeles and delivered to Chambers-Wardlow for burial, Fosselman said. The link to Jonestown was made by the type of casket used and their identification numbers. Names of the three victims were not released.

Two other bodies were found in two of the Jonestown caskets, Fosselman said. One of the two bodies was that of Faustino Dominguez, 57, of Los Angeles, who died in July, 1982. Deputies said they were told by family members that they thought Chambers-Wardlow had buried Dominguez, an Army veteran, in Riverside National Cemetery.

Wardlow told deputies that burial benefits had been denied by the Veterans Administration and there were no funds to pay for a plot. VA records, however, showed that death benefits had been paid, but the records did not indicate to whom, deputies said.

Investigators also reported that Wardlow said he had received no money to bury the Jonestown victims.

The other non-Jonestown victim was described as an elderly, unidentified black man whose body had been delivered to Chambers-Wardlow from the county morgue over the 1983 Memorial Day weekend. The fourth casket contained the remains of an elderly black woman who was assigned to Chambers-Wardlow for burial, Fosselman said. The six bodies remain at the coroner’s office pending completion of the investigation.

Chambers-Wardlow had rented the storage space for about a year, Fosselman said, but precisely how long the bodies had remained unburied and where they had been been before their placement in the storage space remains under investigation.

Chambers-Wardlow went out of business in 1983. Wardlow now works as an embalmer at another mortuary, deputies said.

Jonestown, in the South American country of Guyana, was the site of a religious settlement led by San Francisco’s Rev. Jim Jones, who seven years ago led more than 900 followers to their deaths in a mass suicide.