Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 17, 1993                   TAG: 9308170026
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: RALEIGH                                LENGTH: Medium

CREMATION BEFORE IDENTIFYING OF BODY CRITICIZED

The father of Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan was found Aug. 3 in a creek in South Carolina. His body, then unidentified, was cremated three days later.

He was not identified until Aug. 13.

Unclaimed bodies are cremated in North Carolina, but only after a minimum of 10 days and an extensive effort to identify the person, said Bill Brinkhous, an investigator for the state medical examiner's office in Chapel Hill.

"We would have had the body," Brinkhous said. "We're obligated to keep the bodies 10 days or until we're satisfied all efforts have been made to identify the body. . . . That sometimes takes weeks and weeks."

The decision to cremate James Jordan's body has been criticized by the NAACP and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

"Burial would take significantly more state money. Cremation was decided on years ago and cremation appears to be fairly uniformly accepted," Brinkhous said.

There are two key differences in the way the states handle unidentified bodies. North Carolina has a statewide medical examiner system and a state law that specifies how unidentified bodies are handled; South Carolina has neither.

"South Carolina doesn't have a centralized system for records or anything else, so it's each of the counties sort of fending for themselves," Brinkhous said.

Marlboro County, S.C., coroner Tim Brown did not return a call to his office Monday.

Brown said Friday he ordered Jordan's body cremated because he had no leads to identify the corpse and had no way to halt the decomposition. An autopsy already had been completed and all the evidence had been gathered from the corpse, Brown said.

The NAACP will seek changes in South Carolina's law, said William F. Gibson, a Greenville, S.C., dentist and the head of the NAACP's National Board of Directors.

"The major concern we have is here is a murder victim, definitely a murder victim because of the fact that he's got a bullet wound in the chest . . . and he was cremated," Gibson said.

Gibson also said Brown and other county officials should have anticipated that the body would be identified eventually because of the expensive dental work present.