Donation Helps Rebury Marine - Director keeps body out of pauper’s grave

The Washington Times ^ | Nov 13, 2007 | AP

[RDTF]

The director, Isaiah Owens, said yesterday that he will pick up the reburial costs for a man who will be exhumed from a national cemetery nearly four years after he was mistakenly interred there in a bureaucratic blunder. Until Mr. Owens stepped up and volunteered to pay the $3,000 to $4,000 in funeral expenses, the man faced the prospect of being reburied in Potter's Field, a pauper's graveyard in New York City.

"Whoever he is, he can't do anything for himself anymore," Mr. Owens said. "I'd rather [do] this for him than having him go to Potter's Field."

The mix-up apparently is the first time that "somebody was buried who we thought was somebody else" in any of the national cemeteries, which date to the Civil War era, said Michael Nacincik, a spokesman for the National Cemetery Administration.

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Officials then began an investigation and announced last week that the mix-up was apparently the result of a clerical error.

Both men served in the military during the Vietnam War, but William Hayes received an "other than honorable" discharge, making him ineligible for a military cemetery plot, Mr. Nacincik said. Details on the circumstances of the discharge were not available.

Willie Hayes of Harlem died Sept. 30. Born in 1948, he served in the Army from 1969 to 1970, earning several medals. William Hayes of the Bronx borough was born in 1943 and served in the Marine Corps from 1965 to 1969. He was buried on Christmas Eve 2003, about two months after dying in a nursing home.

No one came forward to claim his body, and the Bronx nursing home staff thought he was homeless.

"The names were very, very similar," and the year of birth was off by one number, Calverton's director, Michael Picerno told Newsday.

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