Carmen Wysong talks to a crowd while getting comforted from Michelle Ross and Debra Schum. Wysong lost her dad Lee Covert who went through Sunset Mesa Funeral homes. The FBI has some answers but giving little closure to families as to where their loved ones ended up. The gathering happened in Delta at the Pow Wow Arbor at Confluence Park on Saturday September 22nd, 2018.
Carmen Wysong talks to a crowd while getting comforted from Michelle Ross and Debra Schum. Wysong lost her dad Lee Covert who went through Sunset Mesa Funeral homes. The FBI has some answers but giving little closure to families as to where their loved ones ended up. The gathering happened in Delta at the Pow Wow Arbor at Confluence Park on Saturday September 22nd, 2018.
DELTA — Richard Sprankle was married to his wife, Elizabeth, for 64 years before she died in November 2017 from pulmonary fibrosis. Though she died before him, the couple had planned to combine their ashes so they could be buried together.
"I can't do that now," he said. "I don't even know what's in the urn. I have no idea. It makes this whole thing worse."
Sprankle is one of hundreds of people who trusted Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors to handle the final arrangements for their loved ones.
At a remembrance event at Confluence Park in Delta Saturday afternoon, approximately 75 people whose deceased loved ones were handled by Sunset Mesa read off names and what happened them, citing what they were told by the FBI.
One by one, people took a microphone and read a name, age, date of death and what happened to their loved one's remains.
Husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons. Two years old, 34 years old, 78 years old.
Some read off body parts that were allegedly removed by Sunset Mesa without the family's consent and sold — ankles and knees, shoulders and torsos that ended up in China or Saudi Arabia or somewhere in the United States.
Many people who spoke said their loved ones were sold without their knowledge to American Plastination Company, which preserves bodies and body parts for medical research.
Many have no idea what ultimately happened to their family members.
Sprankle's daughter, Celeste Gatt, said the family decided to donate Elizabeth's lungs to research because they wanted to help find a cure for pulmonary fibrosis.
"When Dad was contacted by the FBI, he was told that Sunset Mesa had taken more than just her lungs," Gatt said. "But we don't know what else they took."
Rick D'Ambrosio's mother, Dorothy, was supposedly cremated by Sunset Mesa after she passed away in September 2014.
But when he heard what Sunset Mesa was suspected of doing and filled out paperwork online as a potential victim, an FBI agent called.
"The agent said, 'We're 99 percent sure your mom's parts are in Chicago,'" D'Ambrosio said. "We don't know whether her ashes are concrete, yet. I want to know 100 percent whether those body parts are hers first."
D'Ambrosio said if Sunset Mesa had approached him about donation, he might have considered it. But they never did, and he never agreed.
D'Ambrosio's wife, Kimberly, said it has reopened the wounds of losing her mother-in-law.
"You think you trust somebody with your loved ones, and this is what they do. It's been hell," she said.
