Anonymous Bones

This is from a project on the Medical Examiner Cemeteries in Miami-Dade County. These are places that indigents, John Does and I've been told, certain executed criminals are interred. An odd energy hangs over the place, trees lose their bark and bleach in the Florida sun like bones; yet a hundred feet away the same variety of trees are healthy.

An excerpt from an e-mail sent to me by the M.E. tells some history...
...Our records indicate that the county opened the Galloway Cemetery in 1928. County cemeteries are normally used for abandoned, homeless, indigent or unidentified individuals. It is interesting to note the racial prejudices of that time period as records indicate that whites were interred on the eastern half of the Galloway Cemetery and blacks on the western side in those earlier years. Apparently racial discrimination followed people even after death. When the Galloway Cemetery was reaching capacity, the county identified a tract of land behind Indian Hammocks Park as a second county cemetery. That cemetery was reaching capacity as early as the 1990’s. Ground studies then showed that the original interments at Galloway had sunk, and the state authorized a second tier of interments to be conducted at a depth of four feet. It was also in the 1990’s that municipalities around the country switched to cremation as a form of final disposition over interment for cost reasons. Thus Miami-Dade County’s Public Interment Program (PIP) today utilizes cremation for most of its cases. Florida law prohibits cremation in cases where the identity of the decedent is unknown; these cases must be interred. Each year the county averages about three cases that remain unknown, and these are the cases that are still interred now at the Galloway Cemetery. You will notice that there is also a location on the west side of the Galloway property for cases involving veterans who were honorably discharged from military service.