Man’s Ashes Left at Store Boggle Authorities

It’s one of the odder unsolved mysteries still facing the El Monte Police Department: How did a plastic container holding six-year-old cremated remains turn up in the cosmetics aisle of the local Kmart?

“It had to be some customer who left it,” one Kmart employee, who did not give his name because he was not authorized to speak for the store, said Saturday. He added that shoppers regularly leave behind personal items, “but not like this.”

A security guard spotted the container holding the remains identified as those of Jose N. Rivera on Nov. 19 and called the police, said El Monte Police Det. Randy Lovelace. The ashes were labeled as the remains of Rivera, whose family Lovelace traced to Maywood. But he hasn’t been able to find Rivera’s wife, Yolanda, who he said had been given the remains in 1996.

The ashes have sat in the El Monte Police Department’s evidence room for five months. Lovelace said he is prepared to send them to the county coroner’s office but has held off in the hopes that a relative will appear to claim them.

“It’s bizarre,” Lovelace said. “I don’t know where everybody is. I just want to hang on a little more.”

If no one calls, Lovelace said he hopes the coroner “can give him [Rivera] some kind of final resting place.”

Juan Jimenez, assistant chief of the coroner’s operations division, said the county has crypts where it stores unclaimed ashes. His agency is used in cases like this, he said.

He recalled an incident in which someone in an apparent hurry to catch a flight at Los Angeles International Airport left an unmarked brass urn with cremated ashes at the curb.

“It happens so often,” Jimenez said, “it’s unbelievable.”