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Holmes said. “The point is if it’s still at the
level of 5 nanograms per liter of whole
blood, active THC, then the best available
data says you are probably impaired.”
Sarich disagreed, stating that studies show
drug impairment cannot be judged by blood
content. He also argued that as a medical
marijuana patient he is almost never under
now,” Sarich said. “That will be every med-
ical marijuana patient.”
Pete Slack, commander of the Snohomish
County Drug Task Force, also opposes
legalization. He doesn’t think legalizing
marijuana will eliminate the black market.
He said sellers will likely offer lower prices
than what the state-regulated marijuana is
sold for. He is also concerned
that I-502’s taxes, which
could earn the state an esti-
mated $560 million a year,
would be so high they would
make the black market
stronger.
Holmes said he supports
legalization because he wants
to confront the federal ban on
marijuana.
Braxton’s support for legal-
ization is solely based on
stopping the war on drugs,
which he said is actually a war on black and
brown people.
Sarich supports legalization but
argued that I-502, which would
legalize and tax sales of up to
1 ounce of marijuana, isn’t
really legalization because
marijuana will still be classified
as a schedule one drug
the per se limit.
“I’ve had my blood tested and I’m proba-
bly four to five times the legal limit right
Dead
PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED
continued from page 1
Seattle King County Branch of the NAACP President Emeritus Lacy Steele
sells tickets Oct. 13 to a performance by Roy Horn and his band at the
Scarlet Tree Restaurant to help raise funds for the NAACP Get Out the Vote
Campaign. Seattle voters can still register to vote in person until Oct. 29.
For more info go to the King County Election
website: www.kingcounty.gov/elections/registration or call 206-296-8683.
continued from page 1
for respect,’’ Hawkins said standing beside
the stacked urns in the cooler.
Two people, Loretta Whetstone and Ila
Faye Dooley, have been waiting since 1994
for burial. They died the year after the Leg-
islature stopped paying to bury unclaimed
remains. Most, though, died since 2005.
Hawkins is holding onto remains from the
last two years in hopes that they’ll be
claimed. He plans to open the grave up each
year to add remains and take out any that
have been claimed.
Indigent deaths make up only a tiny frac-
tion of deaths in Yakima County each year
-- fewer than 10 out of about 1,700 -- but
people find them unsettling, he said.
In Washington, a dead person’s relatives
are responsible for disposing of the corpse,
regardless of income. But if a body is not
claimed in 90 days and the deceased doesn’t
have money, it falls to the county to take
care of it.
Until 1993, the state Department of Social
and Health Services paid for handling the
corpse, a casket, a cemetery plot, burial and
even a small service when the deceased had
no money. But the $3.3 million program
was lost in a round of budget cuts, accord-
ing to news reports at the time.
Counties tended to provide only enough
money to cover the bare minimum -- cre-
Funeral homes pick up much of the costs
not covered by counties. Benevolent
groups, religious organizations and other
entities also help.
Sometimes, funeral homes have to absorb
all the costs. Some counties won’t pay if
Legally, counties can simply scatter a person’s
ashes after cremation and be done with it. But
Smock said he doesn’t know of any county that
does that
mation, said Cameron Smock, past presi-
dent of the Washington State Funeral
Directors Association and CEO of Bonney-
Watson Funeral Home in Seattle.
Legally, counties can simply scatter a per-
son’s ashes after cremation and be done
with it. But Smock said he doesn’t know of
any county that does that.
any relatives can be located or if the annual
budget for indigent burials is exhausted, he
said.
That is not the case in Yakima County,
according to Hawkins.
Even when cremation is paid for by a
county, charity or family, the ashes can end
up in storage at a funeral home, Smock said.
Salerno wrote to investigators.
Bragg’s father, Steve Bragg of Longview,
declined to comment on the findings.
The report highlights a persistent problem
for the military: Suicides have risen alarm-
ingly even as the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq are winding down. Veterans groups and
others have urged the military to do more to
help soldiers who are struggling with long
deployments, the stress of being away
from home and pre-existing psycho-
logical trauma.
But it also portrays a young soldier
determined to serve. Bragg, 20, enlist-
ed in 2008 after graduating from Mark
Morris High School. She volunteered
at battalion fundraising events,
referred herself to Fort Knox coun-
selors when necessary, and, once she
deployed, fit in immediately with a
new group of soldiers.
The 135-page report, known as a 15-6
investigation, included written statements
from Bragg’s colleagues and commanders,
mental-health counselors and Army offi-
cials at Fort Knox. All names except for
Bragg’s were blacked out in the report.
Capt. Brett C. Shepard, an attorney with of
the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General
Corps, signed it.
Bragg showed no indications
she was having trouble in
Afghanistan, according to Army
interviews with nearly two
dozen of her fellow soldiers. All
said she was a good soldier, and
she had been promoted twice to
specialist while in Afghanistan.
She completed the Army’s sui-
cide prevention training in
November 2011 _ mandatory for all soldiers
_ and attended additional classes designed
to help intervene in other soldiers’ suicide
attempts, according to the report.
The report does not say if anyone would
face discipline in relation to Bragg’s death.
The investigators made three recommenda-
tions:
— Mental-health providers stateside
should share more information about high-
risk soldiers with mental-health providers in
war zones. Camp Salerno’s behavioral
Bonney-Watson, which started in 1868, has
``thousands of cremated remains.’’
Some of the unclaimed remains go back
to the 1800s, but they won’t be thrown out.
``Some family member may come for-
ward some day and claim them,’’ Smock
said. ``And we wouldn’t want to tell them
that we’ve disposed of their uncle’s remains
and can’t retrieve them.’’
Funeral homes go to great lengths to track
down even distant relatives, said Kathy
Birdwell, general manager at Shaw and
Sons Funeral Directors in Yakima.
``What we see in these unclaimed
remains, it’s more than just a financial issue.
It’s the missing human connections,’’ she
said.
There are many reasons a body goes
unclaimed: A person has no relatives or is
estranged from them, or the relatives cannot
pay to bury the body.
Sometimes, the relatives simply don’t
care, said Michael Kearl, a sociology pro-
fessor at Trinity University in San Antonio,
Texas.
Suicide
continued from page 1
deployed. She had been hospitalized after
telling doctors she wanted to crash a car and
injure herself.
They also didn’t know she had weaned
herself off her prescribed anti-anxiety med-
ication to satisfy requirements to deploy.
That was six months before she shot and
killed herself while stationed alone in a
guard tower on Dec. 21 at Forward Operat-
She had weaned herself
off her prescribed anti-
anxiety medication to
satisfy requirements to
deploy
ing Base Salerno.
``It is my opinion that (Bragg) `fell
through the cracks’ created by the lack of
information sharing that had been repeated-
ly requested and denied,’’ a brigade behav-
ioral health officer stationed at Camp
health officer said she had been unable to
get mental-health records for Bragg because
of privacy laws.
— Commanders should develop better
Suicides have risen alarmingly
even as the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq are
winding down
procedures to ensure personnel data is not
lost while transferring soldiers between
units.
— No soldier, regardless of gender,
should be stationed in a guard tower alone.
In the report, Army investigators said
commanders at Fort Knox failed to proper-
ly track Bragg as a ``high-risk’’ soldier who
could potentially hurt herself or others
before she was cleared to deploy to
Afghanistan.
October 17, 2012 The Seattle Skanner Page 3