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Unclaimed dead honored at Haven of Rest ceremony had 275 unique stories; here are a few of them

Posted on May 16th, 2025 By: Ted Kenney

For the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office, a graveside ceremony held Thursday, May 15, beneath overcast skies at Gig Harbor’s Haven of Rest Funeral Home completed one of the office’s core tasks: Laying to rest the unclaimed remains of deceased county residents in a respectful manner.

The publicity generated around the memorial contributed significantly to achieving the ME’s related goal of finding family and friends of the deceased who are willing to claim their cremated remains. The office issued a press release in late April for the event, with a headline announcing it “seeks family or friends for 300 unclaimed decedents.” It linked to a county website giving names and other basic data about the dead, and explaining how loved ones could claim their remains.

In response to the announcement, family or friends claimed the remains of 27 people (out of more than 300 originally) before the ceremony.

“We are happy to have connected these residents with their loved ones,” said Luke Vogelsberg, the medical examiner’s director of operations. The last time the office did this, in 2021, only 10 out of 175 remains were claimed.

Remembering friends and family

For Ed Johnson, a retired Gig Harbor resident, motivation for attending the memorial was more personal. It offered him a chance to honor his friend, Perry T. Lind.

Johnson knew Lind from the decade-plus they spent carpooling together and as co-workers at a SeaTac-based transportation company.

Perry T. Lind volunteered for the Sequim Police Department and is shown here directing traffic during a power outage. Lind later lived in the Cromwell area of the Gig Harbor peninsula. He died in 2021 at the age of 85. Photo by Keith Thorpe, Peninsula Daily News.

Another attendee, Lester Hansen, said he came to the ceremony to remember his mother, Gloria Hansen. Though both lived in Tacoma, Hansen said they’d drifted out of touch for two years. “I figured I’d run into her, but I never did.” He learned of her death in a phone call from the medical examiner’s office that came “out of the blue” following her death in November 2021.

On Thursday, Perry T. Lind and Gloria Hansen were among the 275 names read off by medical examiner’s employees. The employees took turns standing at two podiums beneath the open-sided funeral tent, set up in a flat area along a hillside in Haven of Rest’s cemetery sloping down toward Gig Harbor.

To mark the end of each staff member’s reading, Chaplain Ed Jacobs of West Pierce Fire & Rescue, who officiated at the event, clanged a handbell. That action tied into Jacobs’ chosen reading for the ceremony, John Donne’s 1624 prose work “No man is an island.”

Chaplain Ed Jacobs rings a bell as Medical Examiner’s Office employees read out the names of Pierce County residents whose remains were not claimed. Photo by Vince Dice

Jacobs said he chose the text – which is famous for the lines “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” and “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” — because it illustrates how all people are connected and how the loss of one is a loss for everyone.

The number of decedents honored Thursday was too great to get detailed information about each of them into the ceremony, Jacobs said. The poem is a reminder that “each of us has lost 275 stories, because we didn’t know their stories.”

These are a few of their stories, pieced together from conversations with friends and family and from some of the documents such as court and property records they left behind.

Some of the individuals honored in the medical examiner’s ceremony led troubled lives.

Carla Ann Bluel

Carla Ann Bluel of Ollala lost her autonomy to the state several times during her 58 years, due to prosecutions — for heroin possession, forgery and identity theft — and, near the end of her life, due to incapacitation. The last episode began with her admission to St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor on Christmas day 2020.

In a March 2021 statement supporting a court petition urging appointment of a guardian to take charge of Bluel’s affairs, a social worker for Catholic Health Initiatives described her as suffering from “sepsis, medical non-compliance, bilateral decubitus ulcers, colostomy, anemia, elevated liver function tests, failure to thrive, and multiple skin ulcers.”

“This is the Patient’s third admission to St. Anthony Hospital in five months. She has demonstrated an inability to understand her medical conditions or how to care for herself despite medical interventions and education.”

The petition for guardianship noted that Bluel “refused discharge to a facility and insisted that she return ‘home.’ [She] lives with several friends in a trailer and sleeps on the couch. There are ongoing concerns of substance abuse in the home.”

The petition noted that Bluel has a stepson “who has been contacted and is aware of the Patient’s condition and circumstances; and does not wish to be involved in decision making for the Patient.”

The Pierce County Superior Court appointed a guardian ad litem to represent Bluel and advocate for her best interests on March 8, 2021. However, in January 2022 this guardian reported to the court that his guardianship was no longer needed. “Ms. Bluel cycled in and out of the hospital, discharging to her residence” and died on Dec. 14, 2021.

Seeking next of kin

The medical examiner’s office declined to release any information about any of the people honored Thursday except name, age and city of death. However, it’s a good bet that the office’s medicolegal investigators (that’s the job title of those who search for decedents’ next-of-kin, along with other duties such as investigating death scenes) reached out to Bluel’s stepson.

Vogelsberg said that in searching for family or friends willing to claim cremated remains, the office casts a wide net, searching through court records, newspaper databases, medical records and credit reports.

Investigators reach out to neighbors. Increasingly, they search social media, which they must do using their own accounts, since there is no office Facebook account. (Vogelsberg noted that the office does not contact potential next-of-kin via social media.)

Locating family members does not guarantee these kin will take the unclaimed remains. Reasons for saying “no” include the potential claimants’ age and infirmity, financial constraints, lack of a strong relationship with the deceased, and feeling that the county-provided ceremony is sufficient to honor the departed.

George Samuelson

John Jackson, a resident of Frederickson in east Pierce County, came to the memorial at Haven of Rest to remember his friend George Samuelson, of Elbe, who died at age 60 in 2022.

Samuelson was an honorably discharged Army veteran and a skilled machinist. He had worked as an engineer on crab fishing boats in Alaska – the kind featured in the television series The Deadliest Catch, Jackson said.

Samuelson loved hotrods and Harley Davidson motorcycles, and his shop was set up to perform custom paintjobs. His latest project, repainting a Porsche 944 sports car, stopped when heart issues took his life, Jackson said.

Samuelson lived on the same property as his 94-year-old father and 80-year-old stepmother. He was dedicated to their care, Jackson said. Now Jackson has taken over responsibility for transporting his friend’s parents to appointments and looking after their house and shop, he said.

At the memorial, Jackson stood quietly, watching attendees place yellow and white roses on the two cemetery plots donated by Haven of Rest for this interment. (Another donated plot nearby holds the remains that were laid to rest in 2021.)

After the service, attendees dropped flowers on the gravesite for the unclaimed remains at Haven of Rest in Gig Harbor. Photo by Vince Dice

Jackson said he appreciated the ceremony. “I’m glad there’s a place that someone can go to” where the dead are remembered. Jackson said George Samuelson’s parents weren’t up to traveling to the ceremony, but he will bring the event program to them.

Perry Lind

Perry Lind’s wanderlust had led him to sojourn in rugged places like Alaska, the Olympic Peninsula, and West Yellowstone, Montana. But his final home, before his death from COVID at St. Anthony Hospital in 2021, was a daylight basement apartment in the Cromwell area of the Gig Harbor Peninsula.

People who knew Lind describe him as a jack-of-all-trades with a special knack for electronics. According to his friend Ed Johnson, Lind grew up in Seattle, where his father was a pioneer in the radio industry. (Several radio industry magazines from the 1940s mention a Perry C. Lind as chief engineer at Seattle station KOL.) Johnson attributed Lind’s skill with electronics at least partly to working at the radio station in his youth.

Chaplain Ed Jacobs at the memorial ceremony on May 15, 2025, in the Garden of Peace area at Haven of Rest. Photo by Vince Dice

From 1998 through 2009, Lind and his wife owned a house in the Quail Run Estates subdivision in Gig Harbor, west of Point Fosdick Drive. The pair split in 2013; by the time the divorce settled, Lind had relocated to Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula. During that time, he was a federally-registered firearms dealer, with a business called Sequim Arms Locker (at least one acquaintance said he ran this business from his home).

Around this time, Lind began volunteering at the Sequim Police Department. Sgt. Maris Larsen still remembers Lind as “a very nice guy,” a jovial person who “would help anybody.”

By the end of the 2010s, Lind was back in Pierce County and his firearms business was registered to an apartment in Lakewood. An old friend from the period when Lind lived in Gig Harbor said the owners of the apartment building were going to raise the rent, and Lind had scant resources and nowhere to go. (This friend asked that her name not be published, out of concern for her privacy).

She said that she and her husband added a kitchen to the daylight basement of their house in Cromwell and turned it into an apartment, with a view of Puget Sound and Fox Island.

“We rented at what he could afford,” she said. “He moved in and was happy as a clam.”

Lind was “quiet but articulate,” this friend said. “He was very much a self-made man and was very bright.”

Honoring the lost

The county’s ceremony for the unclaimed dead, including Lind, lasted an hour and drew a crowd of about 50 people (including Haven of Rest and Pierce County Medical Examiner staff).

During the event, speakers including Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello and Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Karen Cline-Parhamovich weighed in on the importance of honoring the dead and speaking for those who could not speak for themselves.

Pierce County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Karen Cline-Parhamovich gets a flower to be placed on the gravesite. Photo by Vince Dice

A tear ran down the face of Katie Peterson, who had lost her mother, Naomi Malast, to drugs on August 23, 2023. “It’s a beautiful ceremony,” she said.

Accompanying Katie was her aunt, Lisa Stock, who was Naomi’s sister.

Stock said the pair learned of the memorial thanks to a news item in Lakewood’s Suburban Times online community bulletin board. She clicked on the link and then “all of a sudden, I saw her name,” Stock said.