Delta Left A Father’s Body Unrefrigerated Overnight, Family Says—Too Decomposed For A Final Viewing

A Tennessee family says Delta left their father’s body unrefrigerated overnight after a missed connection, and by the time the funeral home was able to collect him the next morning, he’d decomposed too much for a final viewing. The story is mostly being told around a connection missed by two minutes. But Delta’s Memphis station instructions are even more problematic: why send human remains on a flight arriving after 8 p.m. when the station says it doesn’t accept them after 7? Marvin “Ed” Morgan had been the announcer at Gleason Raceway in West Tennessee. After becoming ill, he moved to Florida to live with his daughter, Crystal Ladd. When he died, she arranged to bring him home through Eagle Wings Air, which coordinates transportation of human remains. The shipment was booked for June 15, but the story is only now coming to light. (Hat tip to Enilria.) His route was West Palm Beach – Atlanta – Memphis. The first flight ran about two hours late, reaching its Atlanta gate at 2:57 p.m. The connecting flight pushed back at 4:55 p.m. That’s one hour and 58 minutes, and there’s reportedly a two-hour transfer requirement for human remains, so Delta put the body on a later flight. That’s how the story is explained, though reading the rules it seemed to me that shipments have to be accepted and processed at least two hours before scheduled domestic departure, but I (may have just missed but) do not see the two hour connection requirement. The body reached Memphis after 8 p.m., but cargo pickup closed at 7. The receiving funeral home wasn’t permitted to retrieve the body until the next morning. The facility is reportedly unrefrigerated. Morgan hadn’t been embalmed, at his request for spiritual reasons. Delta reportedly knew this, and their published policy permits unembalmed remains. Accepting an unembalmed body and then getting it to a closed facility requires a plan for what happens overnight. The Memphis flight was scheduled to leave at 4:26 p.m. Using that time, the delayed inboundng flight ended up 31 minutes short of a two-hour window. Using its actual departure gives you the two-minute miss. Delta’s Memphis station page, under Facility Information, currently gives this instruction for human remains No overnight holding, and no inbound human remains after 7 p.m. NO OVERNITE OR INB HR AFT 19:00 The reported lack of refrigeration also doesn’t appear to match what Delta publishes: “COOLER IS WORKING AND AVAILABLE.” Even the original itinerary didn’t leave much room at the destination. The scheduled Memphis arrival was 4:49 p.m. Delta allows up to two hours after actual domestic arrival for a shipment to become available for pickup. That takes you to 6:49 p.m., just 11 minutes before closing. It doesn’t mean unloading would take the full two hours, but the plan needed a contingency for delays. I’m reminded of the body Delta misrouted during its April 2017 storm meltdown. Bryant Lee Raburn, 31, had died after battling leukemia. His remains were supposed to go from Raleigh to Nashville, but wound up in Salt Lake City. They were delayed two days, and his family had to spend hours trying to get help. He finally reached Nashville about an hour before the memorial gathering. And in 2013, a family received the wrong person’s casket after Stanley Williams’s remains were shipped on Delta from LaGuardia toward Virginia. The funeral director reported Delta had applied the wrong label. Eagle Wings refunded Morgan’s family and apologized. Delta offered condolences and, according to his daughter, was still investigating. Morgan was buried beside his wife, and his daughter managed to arrange one other wish: a final trip down the dragstrip where he’d spent so much of his life. Topics on this page