A Georgia funeral home owner was behind bars on Tuesday with more charges pending after authorities serving an eviction notice found 18 rotting bodies in a cooler, including those of children and pets.
Police arrested Chris Lee Johnson, 39, of Douglas, Ga., and charged him with 17 counts of abuse of a dead body, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced on Monday.
Their investigation was sparked by a call for assistance from the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday, the GBI said. Deputies were serving the eviction notice at Johnson Funeral & Cremation Services in Douglas, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, when they made the ghoulish discovery: “18 bodies in various stages of decomposition” stashed in a cooler, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. There was also a cat and a dog.
Investigators were ousting Johnson because he was behind on his rent, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But once inside, they found the bodies stored so improperly that it had caused their “serious disfigurement,” according to arrest warrants.
Johnson “knowingly and willfully defaced a dead body while the body is prepared for burial, showing, or cremation in a funeral establishment,” the warrant said.
Authorities appealed to the public for information and said they were working with the families to unravel the identities of the deceased and try to understand what happened, given the “complexity of this investigation.”
Family members told of heartbreak and horror. Douglas resident Sherri Thomas said she was still waiting for her mother’s death certificate and wasn’t even sure she had the correct ashes.
“The first reaction was, I hope it wasn’t our daughter,” an emotional Tiffany Evans told WALB-TV, standing alongside her husband, Jeff. “But then you realize, if it’s not our daughter, it’s someone else’s.”