Parcel Thief Reportedly Steals Cremated Remains Of Man's Mother

With COVID-19 holding much of the nation at a standstill, Kevin Lynch was unable to have a funeral for his mother. Now, he’s suffering a second loss after a package thief appears to have stolen her cremated remains.

“My mum lived a very difficult, had a very challenging life and a very difficult death and this is just a final indignity I guess that she experienced,” Lynch told local TV station FOX 5 DC.

The Washington, DC resident and US Navy commander first thought his mother’s ashes had been lost in the mail. He was expecting them to arrive on April 15 from a California funeral home and when they didn’t, he contacted the post office. But postal authorities said the package had been delivered.

“We searched for it for weeks. Nothing,” he said in a post on DC community news site PopVille.

Lynch said he was eventually able to obtain surveillance footage from his apartment building, which appeared to show the box being taken. So he filed a police report Thursday and DC police are now investigating the matter, multiple local news sources reported.

Margaret Elizabeth Lynch died on March 25 in a COVID-19 ward in San Diego. She was 85. The former nurse was moved from her nursing home to the ward after she got sick with respiratory issues, however, she did not die of coronavirus, Lynch told The Washington Post.

Lynch was with his mother when she died, but due to the pandemic delaying her cremation, he returned home and had the urn sent to him by priority overnight express mail.

In his post on PopVille, Lynch said he hoped that sharing the story would help generate leads to track down the package.

“I am hopeful that the man discarded the package once he realized that it was not valuable to him,” he wrote. “Of course it is invaluable to me and my family. My siblings and I are beside ourselves with grief and despair.”

The package was addressed to Kevin F Lynch, weighed roughly 19 lbs. and was 10 inches long, 7 inches high and 7 inches wide. It was labelled with “cremated human remains” and contained a green, marbled urn bearing an engraving of his mother’s name.

The family plans to hold a memorial service for her after the pandemic.