RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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The gruesome discovery of unrefrigerated, decomposing bodies at a South Deering funeral home two weeks ago exposed the dearth of oversight over Illinois' funeral home industry.
Illinois is one of a mere handful of states that, absent complaints, do not conduct regular inspections of funeral homes, according to a 2025 survey from the International Conference of Funeral Service Examining Boards.
Illinois also is the only state that does not have a board or agency monitoring licensed funeral homes at their physical locations, the group said.
A recently signed law grants the state comptroller’s office more regulatory powers over cemeteries and crematories, but that purview doesn’t extend to funeral homes. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation regulates funeral director and embalmer licenses.
“That kind of fragmentation cannot help this situation,” says Wake Forest University Law Professor Tanya Marsh, who teaches estate law, and studies laws surrounding the treatment and disposition of human remains.
What was found at the South Chicago Chapel funeral home earlier this month has prompted calls from elected officials for more reforms. State Rep. Marcus Evans, D-Chicago Heights, whose district includes the facility, called the situation “horrific” and said the legislature should have been “more proactive” in regulating the funeral home industry.
State Rep. Marcus Evans in 2021.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Gov. JB Pritzker has questioned who should investigate funeral homes given that his administration now only licenses the facilities, but he has said little else about what kind of legislative response should follow the horrors discovered at South Chicago Chapel.
Marsh said the solution typically thrown around in the wake of grisly incidents such as the one in the South Chicago Chapel is to pass stronger licensing laws, limiting who comes into the profession in the first place.
But bad actors, she said, are often already licensed. While the state had revoked South Chicago Chapel owner Clark Morgan’s license in 2024, his wife Johanna had retained her license.
“If we can't figure out how to head off people from engaging in this kind of behavior, then we have to have some sort of enforcement mechanism on the back end to try and figure it out before it's too late,” Marsh said.
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Michael D. Sharkey, an attorney who represents the Illinois Funeral Directors Association, said the group welcomes “fair and thoughtful regulation of funeral service.”
“Illinois has a lot of rules and regulations on the books concerning funeral homes and crematories,” Sharkey said. “[At South Chicago Chapel], I believe that this is a failure of state agencies to properly enforce those and to properly track the alleged nefarious characters.”
Pritzker hints at oversight changes
The state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation said it received a tip about “potential operation concerns” at the South Chicago Chapel, prompting Chicago police to investigate and uncover more than 50 unrefrigerated bodies at various stages of decomposition.
Prior to that tip, what had been going on at the funeral home had gone unnoticed by the state.
But some elected officials, including Pritzker, are questioning whether the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation is the right avenue to handle complaints of potential abuses. The governor said he’s meeting with Comptroller Susana Mendoza’s office about possibly streamlining how complaints are reported to the state.
“IDFPR is a licensing organization, but the investigatory endeavor — we should all discuss whether that's something that should belong to IDFPR or to some other body,” Pritzker said.
On Monday, WBEZ sought clarity from Pritzker’s office on that comment and asked whether the governor favored regular funeral home inspections by the state, tougher criminal penalties for desecrating human remains inside funeral homes or creation of a blue-ribbon panel to propose tougher oversight measures for funeral homes.
A Pritzker spokesperson declined comment.
Thirty-six other states have created separate funeral boards to manage director licenses, funeral homes, crematories and cemeteries. The other 14 states, excluding Illinois, have appointed state agencies, such as public health departments, to the task.
Creating a unified board is something state Rep. Diane Blair-Sherlock, D-Villa Park, is considering. She chairs the House State Government Administration Committee, which typically handles funeral home legislation, and worked on the bill granting the comptroller more regulatory powers over cemeteries.
But Blair-Sherlock said she’s not sure if the comptroller or the IDFPR have the resources to become the state’s one-stop-shop for funeral industry oversight.
“Sometimes we want to give it to a department, and the department says we're not equipped for that,” Blair Sherlock said. “I believe that we will be able to do something early next year.”
And while a vast majority of other states carry out annual or bi-annual inspections of funeral homes, sometimes even unannounced searches, Illinois is one of four states — along with Alaska, Hawaii and Iowa — that do not conduct any inspections of licensed funeral homes, crematories or cemeteries.
Starting next year, the comptroller’s office will have authority to inspect cemeteries only after a complaint has been filed.
“The tragic situation that happened in Chicago, this is not a number of bodies that piled up in the last week, right?” Marsh said. “The more frequent inspections are by the state, the more likely they are to catch this kind of problem before it gets completely out of hand.”
A spokeswoman for Mendoza said she is also looking at implementing harsher criminal penalties for funeral directors who mishandle human remains following what happened at South Chicago Cha...
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