Ex-official at Arkansas funeral home cleared of corpse abuse

FILE — No activity is seen at Arkansas Funeral Care at 2620 West Main Street in Jacksonville after it was closed down in January 2015. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEPHEN B. THORNTON
FILE — No activity is seen at Arkansas Funeral Care at 2620 West Main Street in Jacksonville after it was closed down in January 2015. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEPHEN B. THORNTON

A Pulaski County jury Tuesday cleared a funeral director of criminal wrongdoing over the way human remains were handled at a Jacksonville funeral home that was shut down by state regulators who found decomposing bodies on the premises.

A jury of eight women and four men deliberated just over an hour to acquit Edward Snow of eight counts of abuse of corpse. Each charge represented a body that Arkansas Funeral Care failed to bury or cremate in a timely manner.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza dismissed a ninth charge because of lack of evidence during the two-day trial.

Prosecutors had dropped four other charges at the start of the trial. Each charge was a Class C felony that carried a 10-year maximum prison sentence.

Snow did not testify in the trial, and his attorneys, Marjorie R̶o̶b̶e̶r̶t̶s̶ Rogers* and Lee Short, called no witnesses. Instead, they argued that prosecutors had not proved that Snow committed any crimes, saying that authorities were trying to apply the law in a way it was never intended to be used.

Prosecutors should have to show that the 64-year-old Cabot man had personally mistreated the bodies or caused that to happen, Short said in closing arguments.

"They've got to prove that he personally physically mistreated one of these bodies," Short said.

He urged jurors not to be swayed by the photos of the deceased that showed discolored remains, some in decomposition or stained with mold.

"Just looking at the pictures doesn't tell you the story," Short said, suggesting that the photographs were more likely to show the natural process of decomposition, rather than mistreatment.

Regulators found fault with the way remains were stored and how long they had been kept at the business, which operated on Main Street in Jacksonville, but there was no evidence that Snow was involved in those storage decisions, Short told jurors.

"There's nothing in the statute that says if you're the manager, you're responsible for everything," he said.

If jurors were looking for a villain, they should look to Arkansas Funeral Care's owner, LeRoy Wood, or his son, Rodney Jarrett Wood, who controlled the finances, Short said.

They're the ones who rejected requests by Snow and other employees for more equipment and more staff when the funeral home fell behind in processing remains, Short told jurors.

Also, LeRoy Wood was the only person registered with the state as the Arkansas Funeral Care manager, he said.

"Witness after witness said they begged LeRoy for help -- LeRoy and Rob -- and they said no," Short said, asking jurors to compare how Snow and LeRoy Wood acted when inspectors showed up at the funeral home.

"One's trying to solve problems, and the other is saying, 'I'm not going to give you any help,'" he told jurors.

Undisclosed to jurors was that the Woods had been criminally charged with Snow but had been allowed to shift criminal liability to their company, which was subsequently fined $50,000 by the judge.

Deputy prosecutor Tonia Acker told jurors that Snow had violated one of humanity's most deeply held tenets, respect for deceased ancestors, not through what he had physically done but by neglecting the bodies that had been entrusted to him.

She compared Snow to someone who abuses an animal by refusing to feed, water or otherwise care for it, saying that neglect which causes harm constitutes physical mistreatment under the law just as if he had personally damaged the remains.

Snow, because of his state licensing and his management role at Arkansas Funeral Care, had a duty to better care for those remains, who had once been fathers, sons, wives and daughters and who were still loved, she said.

Funeral regulations require that remains be embalmed as soon as possible and set a week limit on how long a funeral home can hold a body, but Arkansas Funeral Care kept remains that were weeks and months old, Acker said.

"We do not want to see people on a wooden pallet on the floor. We do not want to see bodies stacked up on top of each other in the cooler," Acker told jurors. "We do not want to see loved ones left haphazardly around."

Showing jurors the photographs taken by a state inspector of discolored hands, mottled faces and leaking fluids, Acker said Snow had the state-sanctioned responsibility to act on behalf of the men and women who had families that loved and cared for them.

"This should not happen to anyone for any reason," she said. "This is criminal. You can't just say, 'I asked my boss for more help.' You have to do something."

Among the witnesses testifying Tuesday was Mike Jones, the fired Arkansas Funeral Care employee who complained to the Arkansas State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, which regulates the industry. His complaint led to the weeklong inspection in January 2015 by regulators who shut down the funeral home, fined it $10,000 and reported the situation to police.

On the witness stand, Jones compared the operation to a "B [grade] horror movie."

He testified that the business had so many bodies that it had to stack them on the clothes washer and had run out of refrigerator space to hold them.

Jones told jurors that he regularly warned Snow, although he occasionally spoke to LeRoy Wood, about how badly the business was operating.

"Literally every day, once a day, I said ... 'Ed, the board is going to come in here and shut us down,'" he said. "There was just bodies coming in and no place to put them."

A licensed funeral home director for 42 years and an embalmer for 40 years, Jones testified that he was fired over accusations that he'd stolen a belt from a body he had prepared for burial. He said the belt had been misplaced and was later found but that he had already decided to quit because of the working conditions and had secretly filmed the bodies with his cellphone.

A Section on 06/29/2016

*CORRECTION: Marjorie Rogers is one of the two attorneys who successfully defended Edward Snow, a funeral home director who was acquitted at trial Tuesday. Her last name was wrong in this story.

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