Chapter 22 - THE FUNERAL DIRECTORJoel Mercer nearly lost his license.
Not because he knowingly buried sandbags.
Investigators found no evidence of that.
But his funeral home failed to independently verify the death registration before accepting an allegedly transferred casket.
The employee who handled the paperwork was newly promoted and believed Richard’s repeated claims that out-of-state processing caused the delay.
Mercer himself signed off.
He owned that.
At a licensing hearing he said:
“I allowed a grieving spouse’s urgency to override procedure.”
The board imposed sanctions, retraining, monitoring, and a substantial fine rather than permanent revocation.
Richard had prepared counterfeit documents using templates obtained from public records and information from a deceased-client file his company once encountered during estate renovation work.
Ugly.
But not a genius hacking scheme.
He exploited ordinary trust.
That theme repeated everywhere.
Margaret trusted her son.
I trusted official-looking paper.
The funeral home trusted a transfer packet.
Noah was the person nobody expected to understand anything.
May you like
He understood the most important fact.
Mom was alive.
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