CHICAGO — More than four dozen bodies in various stages of decomposition were recovered Thursday from the basement and attached garage at a South Deering funeral home on the city’s Southeast Side, according to multiple law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation.

Authorities received a tip about the South Chicago Chapel in the 2900 block of East 95th Street and asked that South Chicago District (4th) police accompany them to an inspection, a source said. Near the facility Thursday evening, a squad car sat parked at the intersection of South Exchange Avenue and 95th Street, where police had blocked the road from South Escanaba Avenue to South Commercial Avenue.

At least two people could be seen walking along 95th Street with masks as the two back doors of South Chicago Chapel sat open. Several police sergeants and the officials from the city’s Department of Buildings were also on scene.

A Chicago police spokesman deferred questions to the Cook County medical examiner’s office, which has not released details of the investigation. An Illinois State Police spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Neighbors told The Chicago Tribune that they’ve been smelling something akin to a dead animal in the area for around two months. The odor has been intermittent, neighbors said, but so potent that it made it difficult to go outside at times.

Neighbors Janice Skylas and Maria Paniagua stood down the street from the scene Thursday night and watched the police activity from about a block away.

Skylas and Paniagua, who have lived in the area for decades, said the funeral home had been active. The business had staged a funeral as recently as last week, Skylas, 80, recalled.

The funeral home opened about a couple of years ago, neighbors said. Skylas and Paniagua would often see funeral traffic line the street along Exchange. Neither of them had ever gone inside.

Paniagua, 53, said she thought she smelled something once but for the most part, hadn’t noticed anything was amiss. Skylas, who often does yard work outside, said she hadn’t “thought anything of it.” Rather, she just questioned how well the business had been kept up.

A couple weeks ago, they saw what appeared to be workers associated with the funeral home lay new white gravel outside of the business.

“But before that, it wasn’t a place I would take somebody,” Skylas said.

When Paniagua left her house Thursday morning around 11 a.m., 95th Street had been open to traffic, she said. By the time she returned at around 11:45 a.m., the road was closed.

The South Chicago Chapel case adds another chapter to the Chicago area’s troubled history with the funeral home industry.

In 2025, a funeral home in south suburban Chicago Heights was shut down by state officials after the remains of more than 100 bodies were found improperly stored, ABC 7 reported last year.

That owner was found to be operating without a funeral director’s license, CBS reported.

More than 20 lawsuits were filed related to the Chicago Heights funeral home, records show. Those complaints have been consolidated into one still-pending case.

In July 2009, authorities revealed that workers at the historic Burr Oak Cemetery were reselling graves and dumping hundreds of old remains in an abandoned, weed-covered lot.

The discovery shocked the region’s Black community because of the cemetery’s special significance to Black Americans. Burr Oak was the area’s first cemetery to allow blacks to be interred there, and countless Black American families would bury relatives there over the years. The cemetery is home to Emmett Till, singing icon Dinah Washington and boxing great Ezzard Charles.

The former director of Burr Oak was sentenced to 12 years in prison for her role in the macabre scheme reselling occupied burial plots and dumping their first human remains in a hidden field.

The Chicago area’s history, however, is not an isolated one.

This week in the U.K., a funeral director who failed to bury or cremate people and gave bereaved relatives the ashes of strangers was sentenced to 20 years, according to media reports. Nearly 35 bodies and more than 100 sets of ashes were found by police raiding Legacy Independent Funeral Directors in Hull in March 2024.

In March, the owner of a Colorado funeral home was sentenced to 18 years in prison for mishandling nearly 190 dead bodies, cheating customers and defrauding the federal government through loan applications. Last June, her husband was sentenced to 18 years, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado.

Also in Colorado, in 2023, the operators of Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado, were sentenced to federal prison for illegally selling body parts or entire bodies without the consent of the family of the deceased, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Colorado.

(Chicago Tribune’s Talia Soglin, Lauryn Azu, Jake Sheridan and Gregory Pratt contributed.)

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