A family is searching for answers after the remains of their 6-month-old daughter went missing from a Georgia cemetery.
According to First Coast News, Kamaron Hickman and his former wife, Fatima Nettles, laid their daughter Jada to rest at Hillcrest Memorial Park in Augusta after she died in her sleep in 2001.
Nettles said she and her ex-husband were in the right place in life to conceive and raise their vibrant daughter, but they never got the chance, WDRW News reported. The parents are now left mourning once again after learning that Hillcrest Memorial was “unable to recover” Jada’s remains.
Hickman detailed in an interview with First Coast News, which learned of the story from Hickman’s Facebook post, that he planned to exhume Jada’s remains so he and Nettles could cremate her and carry the ashes in necklaces. He no longer has ties to the Augusta area, so he wanted his daughter’s remains with him in Jacksonville, Florida, where he lives now. But a groundskeeper informed him it wasn’t possible – as “the remains ‘may have’ returned to the earth.”
“It just kind of ripped the scab off everything, all over again,” Hickman said, First Coast News reported. “I’m stuck in between complete just frustration, devastation. On the other side of that is a whole lot of anger because it took a long time for us to kind of process this.”
Hickman said he doesn’t want anyone else to go through what he and his ex-wife are currently dealing with, adding that they won’t rest until something is done.
Walker Posey of Posey Funeral Directors has over two decades of experience in the funeral industry. He told WDRW that taking care of a deceased person is a step-by-step process that begins immediately after your loved one dies — and transparency is vital.
“You get one chance to do this right, you don’t get a second opportunity,” Posey told WRDW. “As a profession, there’s definitely a chain of custody to take care of someone’s loved one, whether it’s from the time they pass away in a hospital or their home to the time that they come into our care to the time it takes to the cemetery.”
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