Funerals and Memorials

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    Her Brother Disappeared in War 80 Years Ago. She Finally Got to Say Goodbye.

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    Margery Hop Wong last saw her older brother Sgt. Yuen Hop in 1943. He was a soldier missing in action, until researchers solved the mystery behind his death.When Margery Hop Wong bade her older brother goodbye in 1943, she was just a 12-year-old girl who loved it when he took her for joy rides in his used convertible around the apple orchards their family worked.Yuen Hop left their home in Sebastopol, Calif., a small town 55 miles north of San Francisco, at 19 to join the U.S. Army. His little sister never saw him again. She knew he had died in the war, but she did not know how. Or where. Or what had happened to his body.On Friday, Ms. Wong, now 94, sat in the front pew of a mortuary just south of her home in San Francisco, her brother’s remains in a casket draped in an American flag. Younger generations of the Hop family and military veterans filled the rows behind her as a singer led the group in “Amazing Grace.”For 80 years, Sergeant Hop was lost. Now, he was found.Yuen Hopvia the Hop familyMs. Wong was the youngest of seven children born to Gin and Chan Hop, immigrants from China who spoke Cantonese and struggled to communicate with their American-born children, who grew up speaking English.Life was difficult because of anti-Chinese sentiment fueled by the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882 to dramatically restrict Chinese immigration. Chinese immigrants were regularly prohibited from living or working where they wanted, Ms. Wong recalled in an interview. She said her brother was proud to have scraped together money working as a mechanic and drying apples to buy a used convertible and tried to make life fun for his brothers and sisters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s Funeral Held Privately in Minnesota 

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      Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in a brazen killing in New York, was laid to rest this week at a private funeral service in his Minnesota hometown.On Monday, while the nation was transfixed by the arrest of a 26-year-old man from Maryland who was charged with the murder, family and friends of the slain executive gathered at a Lutheran church in Maple Grove, Minn., to mourn the loss of a husband and father who ascended from modest roots in Iowa to one of the most powerful roles in the health care industry.In the days since Mr. Thompson’s death, there has been an outpouring of anger at the insurance industry for denying medical claims, with some people even seeming to cheer his killing online. The vitriol has stunned those who were closest to Mr. Thompson, leaving many of them to grieve his death in private ways.“Brian was an incredibly loving husband, son, brother and friend,” Mr. Thompson’s family said in a statement. “Most importantly, Brian was a devoted father to our two sons, and we will miss him for the rest of our lives. We appreciate the overwhelming outpouring of kind words and support we have received.”Mr. Thompson, 50, grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa. His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain, according to an obituary of his father.He spent his childhood summers “walking beans” on farms, going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms, according to two friends.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Owners of Colorado Funeral Home Admit to Abusing Nearly 200 Corpses

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      Jon and Carie Hallford pleaded guilty to corpse abuse after dozens of decaying bodies were found at their funeral home.A couple who owned a funeral home at two locations in Colorado pleaded guilty on Friday to multiple counts of corpse abuse, more than a year after 191 bodies were found decaying at their businesses in a horrific scene, the authorities said.The couple, Jon and Carie Hallford, operated the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs and Penrose, Colo.They agreed to facing 15 to 20 years in prison after they each pleaded guilty in El Paso County Court to 191 felony counts of abuse of a corpse, Michael Allen, the district attorney for the 4th Judicial District of Colorado, said at a news conference.The Hallfords are scheduled to be sentenced in April.Return to Nature advertised to families that their loved ones would be given green burials that included the use of biodegradable caskets, baskets or shrouds.But when a foul odor led investigators to the Penrose location, they found at least 190 improperly stored corpses at the Hallfords’ funeral home in Penrose and Colorado Springs in October last year. They were arrested in November.“The impact on these family members has been immense,” Mr. Allen said.He added that the Hallfords deceived grieving families and that “having somebody violate that trust is something that they’ll likely never recover from.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Liam Payne’s Former One Direction Bandmates Attend His Funeral in England

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      The One Direction singer died at 31 last month after a fall from a balcony.A funeral was held for the former One Direction singer Liam Payne in England on Wednesday afternoon, a month after his death in a fall from a hotel balcony.The private service at a church in Amersham, England, about 25 miles northwest of London, was attended by Mr. Payne’s former bandmates in One Direction, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik.Simon Cowell, James Corden and the model Damian Hurley also attended, photos showed, as well as several members of the girl group Girls Aloud, including Cheryl, Kimberley Walsh and Nicola Roberts. Cheryl is the mother of Mr. Payne’s 7-year-old son, Bear Grey Payne. Mr. Payne’s girlfriend, Kate Cassidy, was also at the service.Harry Styles at the funeral.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Payne’s coffin arrived in a carriage drawn by two white horses. It was lifted by pallbearers and carried into the church.Mr. Payne died at 31 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires on Oct. 16.Prosecutors said that a toxicology report showed that Mr. Payne had cocaine, alcohol and a prescription antidepressant in his system. The local prosecutor’s office said it had accused three people of crimes after his death, though it did not name them. Two of them, including a hotel employee, were accused of supplying narcotics, and the third, who was described as being with Mr. Payne daily during his trip to Argentina, was accused of abandonment of a person followed by death.One Direction was assembled on the British talent show “The X Factor” in 2010 when the members were teenagers. They went on to international success with hits like “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Live While We’re Young” and “Story of My Life.” The band separated in 2016 and the members continued to record on their own. More

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      Church in Egyptian Desert Reveals Early Christian Burial Practices

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      A basilica from the 4th century held a surprising number of tombs with women and children, researchers found.More than a decade ago, archaeologists began to excavate one of the world’s oldest Christian churches in the middle of a forbidding Egyptian desert. Delayed by war, political unrest and a global pandemic, the dig has turned out to be a revealing and confounding look at how early Christians buried their dead.Built on an oasis sometime in the fourth century, the church held a surprisingly large number of corpses: 11 bodies in two crypts and six in separate tombs. Typically, in that period, leaders like priests and bishops would have been buried in a church, while others would have been relegated to cemeteries. But in this desert outpost, most of the remains belonged to women and children.“The fact that there are so many tombs right inside the church is remarkable,” said David Frankfurter, an Egyptian religion scholar at Boston University who was not involved in the project.Whereas ancient Egyptian funeral practices tended to be lavish and grandiose, early Christian burials favored simplicity. The bodies in the church were wrapped in linens, and only two were inside coffins. Bundles of rosemary, myrtle and palm leaves were left with one body, and one child was buried with a bronze cup. Otherwise, the tombs were sparse.The team — led by David Ratzan, a scholar of ancient civilizations at New York University, and Nicola Aravecchia, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis — began excavations at the church in 2012. But political upheaval, as well as the accidental killing of several tourists by the Egyptian military in a nearby area of the Western Desert, kept the researchers out of Egypt for many years. Only in 2023 was the team allowed to return to Egypt and finish its work, as described in a book published in September.The remains of a female from Tomb 10, Room 3, about 50–65 years old, who lived a comparatively élite lifestyle and ate a refined diet.The NYU Amheida ExcavationsA Bronze vessel found associated with a child’s coffin in Tomb 9 in Room 2, the northern crypt in the church.The NYU Amheida ExcavationsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Will Become of Yahya Sinwar’s Body?

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      The death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was confirmed Thursday by Israeli authorities, but questions remain about the location of his body and what may happen to it in the future.Mr. Sinwar was killed by a gunshot wound to the head in southern Gaza during a firefight, Dr. Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national forensic institute, said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday. Dr. Kugel oversaw the autopsy and, after it was complete, Mr. Sinwar’s body was handed over to the Israeli military, he said. He did not know where it was being kept.Israel often holds the corpses of Palestinians, hoping to use them in a future exchange with Hamas or other militant groups, just as Hamas has done with the bodies of hostages killed on or after the Hamas-led attack in Israel. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Sinwar’s body will be held, released back to Hamas or otherwise interred.The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.When asked about an exchange, experts said it is unlikely that Israeli officials would create a situation where his body would be laid to rest in a place that could become a shrine.“What I would imagine would happen is there will be a secret dignified burial in an undisclosed place,” said Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, adding “when bin Laden was killed, he received a dignified Muslim funeral.”When Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was killed in 2011 by U.S. forces, he was quickly buried at sea. That was likely done to avoid the possibility of a shrine, in accordance with Muslim tradition, which requires burial within 24 hours of death.Dr. Kugel estimated that Mr. Sinwar’s autopsy took place between 24 to 36 hours after death, but he could not specify an exact time.Mr. Alterman said that Israeli officials likely have robust protocols in place to deal with the deaths of militants. “There will be a huge Israeli effort to make sure there is nothing left to be an object of veneration,” he said.The burial site will likely be in Israel, he said, and Israelis will want to avoid a situation where his supporters could try to claim he was buried in Palestinian territories as a martyr.When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Iran in late July, Israelis did not have custody of his body. Mr. Haniyeh was buried in Qatar’s capital city, Doha, where hundreds of mourners reportedly lined the streets as his coffin, draped in a Palestinian flag, passed through the streets.Aaron Boxerman More

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      ‘He Saved Many Lives’: Small Kentucky Community Mourns Slain Judge

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      The fatal shooting of the judge has rocked the town of Whitesburg. On Sunday, friends, family and community members gathered to remember the victim.As a rural Kentucky town reeled from the fatal shooting of a judge, residents over the weekend mourned the victim whom many saw as a kind man who loved his community.The judge, Kevin Mullins, 54, was remembered by many for providing second chances to people struggling with drug addiction in Letcher County, Ky., a tight-knit Appalachian community located about 150 miles southeast of Lexington. Tributes to Judge Mullins poured in on social media over the weekend, from friends, relatives and others who simply knew him as a judge. Some posted memories of him chatting with colleagues outside the courthouse on smoke breaks and talking about his love for his wife and two daughters. “Kevin was a lot of things to a lot of people,” his wife, Kimberly Mullins, wrote on Facebook. “But he was Everything to me and my girls.” Ms. Mullins said on Sunday that she could not comment further.But the mystery around what transpired between Judge Mullins and Shawn Stines, the sheriff who is accused of shooting him, was still top of mind for many in the community.On Thursday afternoon, Judge Mullins and Sheriff Stines, also known as Mickey, ate lunch together before meeting in the judge’s chambers in the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg. According to investigators, the two men got into an argument and, around 3 p.m., Sheriff Stines shot Judge Mullins multiple times in the chest before surrendering to the police. Sheriff Stines is facing a charge of first-degree murder and being held in the nearby Leslie County Detention Center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the Funeral Home for New York’s Elite

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      Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. John Lennon. Greta Garbo. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mae West. Arthur Ashe. Ivana Trump. Luther Vandross. Heath Ledger. George Balanchine. George Gershwin. Mario Cuomo. Biggie Smalls. Nikola Tesla. Celia Cruz. Joan Rivers. Aaliyah. Ayn Rand. Lena Horne. Norman Mailer. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Logan Roy.What do these people have in common?The answer is that, shortly after their deaths, they passed through the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.For over a century, Frank E. Campbell has been the mortuary of choice for New York’s power brokers and celebrities. In some circles, to end up anywhere else would be a fate even worse than death.The writer Gay Talese, a longtime Upper East Sider, has lost count of how many services he has attended there.“For a certain kind of person, they must end up at Campbell as a matter of honor and status,” Mr. Talese, 92, said. “And Campbell is the rare New York business that might never close, because it will never run out of customers — because everyone dies.”“Eventually, sure, I’ll probably have my own moment at Campbell,” he continued. “I’ll enter reclined on my back and have a moment of silence there while friends and relatives come to stare at me. It’s the final stop. The last picture show.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After Georgia Shooting, a Grief-Stricken City Seeks Solace, and Answers

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      At candlelight vigils and in Sunday church services, at fund-raisers for funerals and in quiet moments at home, another city began wrestling with a grief that has been inflicted on numerous American communities before it, a profound sorrow swirled with anger and confusion caused by a deadly mass shooting.And now, those emotions in Winder, Ga., were streaked with budding doubts there had been missed opportunities to intervene before a gunman killed two students and two teachers last week at Apalachee High School.Some in the community — including family members of victims, and students and parents at the school — expressed increased skepticism on Sunday about whether indications that the 14-year-old suspect was a threat had been adequately heeded by the teenager’s family, school officials and law enforcement officials.The concern grew after reports emerged of the suspect’s mother calling the school roughly a half-hour before the authorities responded to the shooting, apparently to warn them.“We believe it was preventable — 100 percent,” Lisette Angulo, the older sister of Christian Angulo, a 14-year-old boy who was killed, said of her and her family’s perspective in a message sent to The New York Times. “They knew of the situation beforehand,” she said, “and didn’t take proper action to prevent this tragedy from happening.”Ms. Angulo praised the officers and emergency workers who responded to the shooting on Wednesday morning, namely the school resource officers to whom the suspect surrendered. They had acted “efficiently and appropriately,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More