Life is tough in Detroit, no doubt about it. So tough, in fact, that you can’t even escape it in death.

This week, cops doing the detroitblog thing by entering an abandoned building and looking around found more than the usual pigeon droppings and empty liquor bottles:

Clad in suits, their arms crossed and their bodies laid out peacefully in their caskets, these two were ready for eternity.
But their final resting place wasn’t supposed to be a second-floor room in a shuttered funeral home.
Instead of being buried or cremated, the two unidentified men apparently were in the building for at least a year until Thursday, when Detroit police officers found them while checking for vagrants at the old Pope Funeral Home on Plymouth Road.
They were badly decomposed, but still waiting to be put to rest.

I swear, that would’ve been the blog post to end all blog posts, had I been the one to come across that scene. Though holding the camera steady while pissing my pants might’ve made for some blurry photos.

Poor bastards. But at least they made it to the funeral home rather than being swiped:

Three men were arraigned Friday following the discovery of a body stolen from a Southfield hospital and dumped in a trash bin behind a Detroit shopping center.
The men are accused of posing as funeral home workers Sunday night, going to Providence Hospital in Southfield and taking from the hospital’s morgue the body of a man in his mid-80s who had died of natural causes.
Police say the defendants had planned to take the stolen body to a funeral home, claim it was that of a man for whom they had purchased a life insurance policy, obtain a death certificate and cash in the policy.
When the plan fell apart, the body was dumped.

It’s tough being a dead body in the city. No wonder the dead are asking their relatives to dig them up and haul them out to the suburbs:

“Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they’re afraid to come to the city,”said Stephen Vogel, dean of the school of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy. “There are about 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of racism and fear.”

This is nothing new; the Freep reported on this several years ago:

Half a century after the living started leaving Detroit, the dead are following.
A growing number of suburban families are unearthing the bodies of their loved ones from Detroit cemeteries and spending thousands of dollars to move them closer to their new homes.
The trend has spread mostly by word of mouth among older Catholics in Macomb County. They are from some of the same families whose departures from Detroit’s east side after World War II contributed to an eventual loss of one million Detroit residents — half its peak population.
Although no one keeps statistics on the phenomenon, the rate of after-death migration in southeast Michigan may rank first in the nation, said David Walkinshaw in Boston, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.

This isn’t nearly as crazy as it seems at first glance; older people who moved miles away years ago don’t like driving an hour each way to visit people who aren’t exactly lively when they get there. Might as well drive around the corner to visit these deadbeats.

I’m not sure, as the quote from the dean claims, that fear and racism are necessarily to blame. Fear, maybe, due to things like signs at places like local historic cemeteries warning visitors to lock their car doors while driving through. When the signs at the local cemetery, of all places, tell you to be fearful, you’re probably should worry a bit.

Racism? That’s the usual kneejerk excuse provided by academics like Vogel, who is actually a dean of architecture at U of D. Not sure why he feels himself qualified to make sweeping sociological statements despite having no sociological background, and tarnish whole groups of people he’ll never meet while he’s tucked away in his cocoon in academia.

Ah, but many academics in the liberal arts are convinced of their superiority over the stupid masses. He doesn’t have to be a real sociologist; just by virtue of being an academic he still knows more about us than we dumb rednecks do. He’s so far removed from normal people that he postulates them as stupid, wicked bigots, not like his peers in the corridors of knowledge, who are wonderful, brilliant, caring people.

People left (and still leave) Detroit for various reasons, many having nothing to do with racism. Perhaps if he condescended to mingle with real people, he’d realize this.