ALLENTOWN, Pa. – It’s the most important thing on Lehigh County Coroner Daniel Buglio’s to do list. Cleaning the evidence storage room is a top priority, because it’s filled with the remains of people who were never claimed after they died.<\/p>\n
“We probably roughly had 25 to 35 remains,” said Buglio.<\/p>\n
Most of the boxes at the coroner’s office contain ashes. One is a box of skeletal remains. Some of the cases date back to 1988.<\/p>\n
Buglio has enlisted bereavement coordinators Jessica Tirpak and Alexandra Cortese to help connect the unclaimed with family if possible.<\/p>\n
“Sometimes, it’s not only, you know, tarnished relationships or lack of family members. Sometimes it’s a financial situation where the family just can’t, they can’t provide,” said Tirpak.<\/p>\n
Meet Ashley Sweeney. She only has one picture of her mother, Colleen Filben.<\/p>\n
“That’s her dog Grumpy, an English Springer Spaniel,” said Sweeney.<\/p>\n
Ashley’s mom died from cancer in 2005.<\/p>\n
“I was kind of in a dark place in my life,” said Ashley.<\/p>\n
Ashley says for the last 20 years she’s lived with regret and without closure thinking her mother’s remains were lost forever.<\/p>\n
“Just always a piece of my heart missing,” said Ashley.<\/p>\n
She made a TikTok about the day that all changed and she was reunited with her mother’s ashes.<\/p>\n
“It’s like now I’m just I feel like whole again and I feel like I could begin to grieve the full grieving process,” said Ashley.<\/p>\n
She says she’s now in a really good place and she knows her mom would be proud of her.<\/p>\n
Another person who came forward is Joe Hart.<\/p>\n
“I was on Facebook and I saw a post,” said Hart. “That listed the names of people that the coroner had.”<\/p>\n
Joe says one name jumped out at him.<\/p>\n
“I recognized Wayne Persing as somebody had that had served at Han-Le-Co Fire company years ago,” said Joe.<\/p>\n
Wayne was a fire police captain and a driver at Joe’s wedding.<\/p>\n
“He was a good guy,” said Joe.<\/p>\n
A good guy who was like an uncle to some of the member’s kids. He died in 2012. Behind the Han-Le-Co Volunteer fire department, the fire company set up their aerial ladder with a large flag over the podium to give Wayne a proper send off.<\/p>\n
“We had four bagpipers and a drummer,” said Joe. “I think Wayne would’ve approved of it.”<\/p>\n
Moments like these are why Buglio and his team keep searching.<\/p>\n
“It’s kind of heartbreaking because we really want to do the right thing you know. Once we exhaust you know those efforts,” said Buglio. “It falls on us.”<\/p>\n
Buglio’s staff has trimmed the number of unclaimed souls down to nine.<\/p>\n
On a sunny September morning, Buglio and his team pay their final respects to 8 of the unclaimed souls. Buglio invited the community to attend the funeral via social media. But he had no idea how large it would be. Dozens of people turned out.<\/p>\n
People like Alex Manes.<\/p>\n
“It pulled strings on my heart,” said Maness.<\/p>\n
With 8 unclaimed souls now at peace Buglio turns his full attention to the remains of the last person on the shelf. We’ll have that store in part two of our series “Unclaimed Souls.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – It’s the most important thing on Lehigh County Coroner Daniel Buglio’s to do list. Cleaning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-94051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news","11":"tag-pennsylvania"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}