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Dr. Janine Darby was touring the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office in 2023, months before she would be elected to lead it, when she saw something that she said “just kind of made [her] sad.”
It was a file room containing shelves filled with the hundreds of unclaimed, cremated remains of people whose deaths the office had investigated.
“I didn’t know this existed until I actually saw with my own eyes that this is how we’re keeping these unclaimed and abandoned decedents,” Darby told WHYY News. “And so I’m like, ‘We have to do something better than this.’”
Darby made the project one of her “missions,” she said, after being sworn in as county coroner in January 2024.
On Monday, that vision becomes a reality. The county is breaking ground on the structure that will serve as a designated resting place for those unclaimed or abandoned remains.
Darby said the resting place, which she hopes will be completed by the end of December, is the first of its kind for any coroner’s office in the state.
“Everyone deserves to be remembered. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity, and … respect with death, as well, not just with life.”
