Latasha Johnson laid her mother to rest on Thursday at the South Chicago Chapel, just hours before the funeral home rose to a level of infamy that Johnson could not have anticipated when she set out to give her mother a final goodbye.
As the funeral service began to wind down, Johnson said, about 30 police cars surrounded the South Deering building, where they would soon make a gruesome discovery.
After receiving a complaint, police officers and a state regulator found more than 50 decomposing bodies at the funeral home at 2939 E. 95th St. The complaint had reported that remains were not being properly stored at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, according to police reports.
In the wake of the discovery, authorities began an investigation into the funeral home as well as a large-scale effort to identify and examine all the remains. Community members and politicians condemned the treatment of people’s remains and called for criminal charges and more regulation of the funeral industry, while family members of the deceased grappled with the horror of what happened to their loved ones.
The Chicago Police Department’s Calumet Area Detectives are conducting a criminal investigation, a spokesman said.
“I want to see some justice,” Johnson said. “I want to see them not get any more licenses. I want them to go to jail.”
Records identified the owners and operators of the funeral home as Clark and Johanna Morgan, who have a history of allegations of misconduct in the course of their work in the local funeral industry. Attorneys for the Morgans did not respond to requests for comment. No one answered the door at the Morgans’ southwest suburban home Friday morning.
Mayor Brandon Johnson on Friday condemned the funeral home for appearing to profoundly violate the trust of families in their most difficult moments. In a statement, he praised police, the county medical examiner and state regulators for swiftly investigating the allegations.
“As this investigation continues, our hearts are with every family searching for answers,” Johnson wrote. “We hope they receive the clarity they deserve, and the peace of mind of knowing their loved ones will be laid to rest with the dignity, care and respect every person deserves.”
In a statement Friday afternoon, the medical examiner’s office asked family members to email [email protected] with their contact information, relationship to the decedent and that person’s name, date of birth and date of death. The office will confirm identifications and ensure proper paperwork is filed before releasing the remains back to family.
Family members can then work with a funeral home of their choice or have the medical examiner’s office handle cremation at no additional cost.
Funeral home directors are regulated by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. Late Friday, spokesperson Steven Johnson said the agency received “information about potential operational concerns” on July 31. Johnson said it initiated expedited disciplinary proceedings, suspended Johanna Morgan’s funeral director license and notified law enforcement.
Gov. JB Pritzker on Friday said he was “listening to IDFPR about what processes the funeral home went through,” and what, if anything, could have been done to prevent the “awful” situation discovered this week.
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Still, he questioned whether the issues lay with monitoring and licensing or with the individuals running the business.
“I do want to point out that the bad actor here is the funeral home, and that they’ve done something just horrific,” Pritzker said. “And we’ve got to make sure and hold them responsible, and of course look at all the processes for licensing.”
On Friday, authorities completed the grim task of removing all the bodies from the funeral home to the Cook County medical examiner’s office, rolling one body out at a time, wrapped in white bags.
Outside the medical examiner’s office, two dozen family members of one of the deceased gathered, standing hand-in-hand and praying.
“Something needs to happen to the owner and those who were working for him,” said Frida Najera, 29, who lives near the funeral home and watched the body removal process unfold Friday morning. “They know what was happening.”
During a walkthrough of the facility, the state regulator and a group of officers encountered the remains of around 56 people stored in different areas of the funeral home unrefrigerated, a police report stated.
Inside the funeral home, sources told the Tribune on Friday, police and other authorities encountered bodies on gurneys but also on shelves alongside equipment. Some of the bodies were not bagged, and some appeared to have severed limbs.
In 2025, a crematory in south suburban Chicago Heights owned by Clark Morgan was shut down by state officials after the remains of more than 100 bodies were found improperly stored.
More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed against Heights Crematory and the Morgans since state regulators closed the facility last year. Those complaints, alleging improper handling of remains, have since been consolidated.
After the crematory was closed, the medical examiner’s office created a public database to help families recover their loved one’s remains. As of Friday, more than 460 people remained on that list.
Karen Enright, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an interview with the Tribune that many of her clients “have to constantly question themselves.”
“A number of my clients have nightmares about this, and they feel guilty because they’re the ones that, perhaps, chose the funeral home,” Enright said. “They’re the ones that chose the crematory. They thought they were following their loved one’s wishes.”
In some instances, Enright said, families learned that the remains they buried were not, in fact, their loved one.
“I have families that, maybe, have lost a child or lost a family member at a young age and buried them with other family members, only to find out that what they buried with their other family members is not the right remains,” Enright added. “The trauma that these families have to go through in that realization. … Even just the body being improperly handled and disrespected in that manner is traumatic.”
Illinois comptroller Susana Mendoza, whose office has some investigative authority over crematories and shut down the Chicago Heights crematory owned by Clark Morgan last year, on Friday said businesses that mishandle human remains need to be dealt with as quickly as possible.
But the IDFPR, not the comptroller’s office, is responsible for licensing funeral home directors such as Johanna Morgan, Clark Morgan’s wife who had her license suspended in response to the discovery at the South Chicago Chapel home.
While Mendoza didn’t know the details of IDFPR’s oversight of South Chicago Chapel, the department was “on site with us, with our office, a year and a half ago when the crematory situation at Chicago Heights was happening,” she said. “So they were clearly well aware that these were terrible, terrible actors who didn’t run a crematory but instead ran a house of horrors.”
The appearance that “these same operators” were causing similar issues at the funeral home is “infuriating,” said Mendoza, who is running for mayor.
Illinois notably tightened state oversight on funeral homes in 2024 following a finding that a central Illinois business had given dozens of families the wrong remains. Under the updated law, IDFPR is required to inspect funeral homes within 10 days of receiving a complaint about mishandling or misidentification of human remains.
Mendoza on Friday called for the state to consolidate oversight power for funeral home directors and crematories under just one entity — either her office or IDFPR — instead of splitting it between multiple regulators.
“No one’s perfect, but certainly you want to make sure that you have a tight understanding of what’s happening in each and every one of your agencies,” Mendoza said, asked about Pritzker’s oversight of IDFPR in the context of the funeral home discoveries. “Like, when I find out that things are happening, I better get on top of it right away. And so, I would anticipate that the governor is going to look much more forcefully into what’s happening, what has or has not been done.”
Ald. Peter Chico, 10th, whose ward includes the funeral home, said the improper storage was “horrifying” and called on state officials to reexamine policies regulating funeral homes.
“Just to think about the lack of humanity that those bodies were handled with, and really the families, my heart goes out to the families who are now wondering about the remains of their loved ones,” he said.
Neighbors told the Tribune that they’ve been smelling something akin to a dead animal in the area for around two months.
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As she watched authorities work the scene on Friday, Najera said that she’s lived off South Exchange Avenue for her whole life and had never seen a sight like it.
“It’s devastating,” she said. “I don’t have any words.”
On Friday morning, Patrice Halliburton came to the funeral home looking for answers, because her sister’s body was kept at the facility before she was cremated.
Halliburton’s family is now wondering if the ashes they have actually belong to their loved one.
“Because she was here in the last 60 days, we’re really concerned about it,” Halliburton said.
For Latasha Johnson, whose mother’s funeral was interrupted by the police response, it’s difficult to contemplate her mother’s treatment there. She now must go to the medical examiner’s office in coming days to identify her mother’s body, shortly after she thought she put her to rest.
At least, she said, Chicago police officers allowed them to finish the funeral, which she said she appreciates.
“I wanted to put my mom away nicely. But that didn’t happen” Johnson said. “All the time my mom was here … her body was thrown on top of decomposed bodies with lice and rats running around.”
The investigation is not the first into the funeral industry in the Chicago area.
In July 2009, authorities revealed that workers at the historic Burr Oak Cemetery were reselling graves and dumping hundreds of old remains in an abandoned, weed-covered lot.
The former director of Burr Oak was sentenced to 12 years in prison for her role in the macabre scheme.
The case also mirrors incidents across the country where remains were allegedly mishandled.
Last month, police arrested two men in Pueblo, Colorado, for allegedly mishandling at least two dozen decomposing bodies and other remains found behind a hidden door in a funeral home.
That followed the discovery of 18 bodies in various stages of decomposition at a funeral home in Georgia in 2024. In 2023, nearly 200 decomposing bodies were found in a building in Colorado, and another 31 decomposing bodies were discovered at an Indiana funeral home.
The baiduhai’s Jake Sheridan, Talia Soglin and Tess Kenny contributed, as well as the Associated Press.