North Dakota Post Office Lost Mom’s Ashes; Cremains Still Missing 8 Months Later

GRAND FORKS, ND — What happened to Mary Louise Mink's ashes? No one seems to know the answer, least of all her son, Donald Mink, who got a call on Feb. 23 that his 77-year-old mother had died at a hospice facility in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He arranged to have her body cremated and have the ashes shipped to his home in Seymour, Indiana, so he could bury them near her parents.

But a huge foul-up occurred. The U.S. Postal Service says it shipped the remains from the North Valley Crematory in Grand Forks to Mink's home in Seymour on Feb. 28 via its Priority Mail Express service — the only legal way to ship human remains, according to media reports.

But the precious package never arrived. In the eight months since, Mink has been entangled in legal disputes with both the Postal Service and the crematory, which he sued for $1 million. And his attorney quit, so he is faced with wrangling post office lawyers on his own.

Mink, 43, told The Washington Post he called the North Dakota crematory in March and asked for a tracking number for his mother's ashes, but got an unsatisfactory and confusing answer. (For more news like this, sign up for real-time breaking news alerts and free morning news letters from Across North Dakota Patch or Fargo Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Mink told The Post a crematory employee answered the phone, and "his exact words were, 'The post office is supposed to get ahold of you.' I was like why? 'Well, they're going to call you and explain everything to you, and they're going to make it right.'

"He tells me that the post office told [him] not to give me a tracking number," Mink said. "I called the post office. The lady on the other end said there’s no way they’d ever do that."

In a follow-up conversation, the crematory employee did provide a tracking number, reportedly telling Mink, "I didn't want to be the one to tell you, but you mom's remains have been lost."

And, in a cruel irony, the package has been officially listed by the Postal Service as "dead mail," WAVE-TV reported.

According to that report, Wayne Sykes, the crematory manager, explained in a letter to the North Dakota State Board of Funeral Service how the package containing Mary Mink’s ashes was handled.

The temporary urn was "... placed in a heavy plastic liner bag, using the urn fill tub equipment. The liner bag was zip tied with the North Valley Crematory metal cremation I.D. disc for identification attached by the zip tie. The liner bag containing the cremated remains was then placed inside of the black vinyl temporary container (urn) and the empty space was filled with foam packing peanuts for protection. The certificate of cremation was enclosed inside the black temporary container. The vinyl temporary urn was then placed into the white cardboard outer container. An additional copy of the cremation certificate was taped with scotch tape to the outside of the cardboard container. The temporary urn enclosed by the white cardboard container was inserted into a tight fitting Tyvek type shipping envelope, wrapped with two strips of 2 inch vinyl tape around. The post office shipping car was attached on the outside of the Postal Service envelope, and completed for mailing by the U.S. Postal Service agents."

An electronic copy of a Postal Service photo of the missing package obtained by Mink's attorney showed that it had been ripped open and was empty, and the temporary urn was gone. The crematory had placed the temporary urn in an envelope, rather than the recommended cardboard box by the Postal Service, and the return address was incomplete, The Post reported.

The Postal Service did apologize, telling WAVE in June:

"The Postal Service offers our deepest sympathy to the Mink family for the loss of their loved one. We are keenly aware of their desire to locate the missing item as soon as possible. We regret that to date the cremains have not been located, but are committed to our ongoing, vigilant search to find them."

The cremains may be at a Tennessee processing facility for undeliverable mail, but Mink doubts with all that has happened that his mother's ashes will ever be found.

“It’s ridiculous that they tell me that my mother’s remains are just missing mail,” he told The Post. “It may be to them but it’s more than that to me and my family.”

Mink told The Post he already was riddled with guilt. His mother hadn’t wanted to be cremated, but to have her body shipped from North Dakota to Indiana was cost-prohibitive.

"I had no choice, you know what I mean? Because I didn't have the money to have her body brought back here for a funeral," Mink told The Post. "That was one of the hardest things I've ever done."

And his lawsuits have gone nowhere.

The lawsuit against the North Valley Crematory, which blames the Postal Service for the foul-up, was dismissed after the state funeral board ruled th crematoy followed the legal requirements for shipping Mary Mink's ashes. The Postal Service has denied Mink's claim for damages, saying it is protected under the Federal Tort Claims Act. And, further complicating Mink's life, the crematory has threatened to sue him for slander over remarks he made to Valley News Live in June.

"Nobody is taking responsibility," Mink said at the time, noting later in the interview that the crematory erred in shipping. "Obviously, they didn't know what they were doing."

When Mink refused to recant the statement, his attorney quit. Since then, he's been searching for another attorney. He hasn't found any takers in the entire state of North Dakota, though.

"It's not about the money. Me and my family, we live comfortably. We go on two or three vacations a year. I work my tail off," Mink told The Post. "It's just, my thing is, the only way to get people's attention is to hit them in the pocketbook. That's the truth."

Mink's experience does raise questions as shipping cremated remains becomes "more common as families scatter and they are displaced," Danny Purcell, a member of the Kentucky Board of Embalmers, told Fox News. However, he said that in 34 years as a funeral home owner, he's never heard of a case in which cremated remains were lost.

And Barbara Kemmis, an executive with the Cremation Association of North America, told The Post that her sense is that Mink's experience is "just anecdotal" and "that it happens infrequently."

But, she said, the most frequently visited page on the organization's website, "so clearly it's a topic of interest."

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