Urn containing a Georgia woman's ashes washes up in New Jersey. How did it get there?
OCEAN CITY, N.J. – Paulette Eva Rose Tricoche died last summer at age 71.
The Reidsville, Georgia, woman was cremated and her ashes placed in a purple urn, etched with her birth and death dates, along with a simple message: "In Loving Memory Mom."
On Oct. 7, that urn washed ashore in Ocean City, New Jersey – more than 800 miles from the Georgia town of 5,000 west of Savannah.
Ryan Leonard, 39, said his children found the urn in some sea grass outside their home on Friday.
Jackson, 7, and Reid, 3, were sifting through "sea grass that had washed up in the storm," Leonard said in an interview Friday. It was found with other random things like small bouys and a flip flop.
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The family lives right on the bay and is familiar with things washing up there, "mostly things that drop off a boat into the lagoon – tags and surfboards, that kind of stuff," but never something as odd as an urn.
Leonard found an obituary for Tricoche online but couldn't find anything about a family. He reached out to the funeral home that posted the obituary.
On Saturday, Bradley B. Anderson, of the Bradley B. Anderson Funeral Home, said a check of his records indicate Tricoche was originally from Cape May Court House, New Jersey, but was living in Macon, Georgia, when she died.
Her remains were shipped to a family member in Cape May County last summer, said Anderson, whose funeral home is also a regional low-cost crematorium.
“What it sounds like to me is she tried to do a burial at sea and it washed up,” he said.
Anderson said he was trying to put the family member in touch with Leonard so they could figure out the next steps.
For now, the Leonards are storing the urn in their garage.
This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Urn containing Georgia woman's ashes washes ashore in New Jersey
