Chicago inspectors return to funeral home where 55 bodies were found decomposing

Inspectors from the Chicago Department of Buildings spent about an hour on Friday examining a shuttered South Side funeral home where more than 50 decomposing bodies were discovered in August, the latest step in a court-ordered review that will help determine whether the building should be demolished. A team drawn from the department's electrical, carpentry, plumbing and demolition bureaus toured the site at 2939 E. 95th St., the address of South Chicago Chapel, before leaving without speaking to reporters, according to a public radio account of Friday's inspection. Findings are due to be presented to a Cook County judge at a hearing on Oct. 29.

The inspection traces back to Aug. 6, when authorities acting on a tip found 55 bodies, plus a bag of organs later matched by DNA to one of them, stacked in a rear storage room at the chapel, many of them decomposing, maggot-infested and kept outside refrigeration. The city has sued the funeral home's owners, Clark and Johanna Morgan, citing 23 building code violations and seeking fines of $11,500 a day until the conditions are corrected. A Cook County judge, Federico Rodriguez, has already barred the Morgans from using, renting or leasing the property and ordered Friday's comprehensive inspection as part of the ongoing case.

A pattern of warning signs

Friday's visit is only the latest chapter in a longer regulatory record. Johanna Morgan, the chapel's registered funeral director, had her state license suspended on Aug. 5, one day before the bodies were found, after the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation opened an inquiry into "potential operational concerns" at the site. State records reviewed by local reporters show the agency had inspected the chapel as recently as October 2025 and found "no serious concerns," only to file formal disciplinary charges against Morgan three days after that visit, a discrepancy regulators have not explained publicly.

Her husband's record is longer still. Clark Morgan's funeral director and embalmer intern license was revoked by the state in 2024, two years after he began drawing scrutiny for a different business: Heights Crematory, which he operated in Chicago Heights, south of the city. The Illinois Office of the Comptroller, which regulates crematories, summarily suspended that facility's license in March 2025 and moved to permanently revoke it after finding roughly 100 bodies awaiting cremation on-site, including 19 concealed in an unmarked refrigerated trailer trucked in from Indiana, along with hundreds of boxes of unclaimed cremated remains with no traceable paperwork. The license was permanently revoked that June.

The crematory case prompted the legislature to act, but only for crematories. A measure Gov. JB Pritzker signed in June, now codified as Public Act 104-0501, takes effect Jan. 1, 2027, and gives the comptroller's office expanded authority to inspect crematories and summarily suspend their licenses without a prior hearing. No comparable facility-inspection authority exists for funeral homes, which the state licenses by individual director rather than by building, a gap officials have acknowledged let South Chicago Chapel keep operating even as warning signs accumulated around the same family's businesses.

Families still waiting for answers

The Cook County Medical Examiner's Office said on Oct. 14 that it had finished identifying all 55 sets of remains recovered from the chapel, more than two months after the discovery, using fingerprinting, dental records, radiology, DNA testing and visual identification, according to a local newspaper's account of the identification effort. For relatives, the process has been slow and unsettling.

Marshawna Campbell arranged her mother's cremation through the chapel after Shawnese Shannon died of cancer earlier this year. After learning that the man who had picked up her mother's body was accused of mishandling remains, Campbell and her sister opened the urn they had been given and found what looked like chunks of a white substance rather than ashes. "All of our questions are still unanswered," Campbell said.

The chapel sits on a residential block in the South Deering neighborhood, and neighbors have raised concerns of their own since the discovery. Advocates say the shuttered building, which has stood empty and padlocked since August, poses an ongoing risk to people living nearby.

"This is a house of horrors we're standing next to," said Lisette Guillen, a crisis responder with Case Files Chicago who has worked with several of the families affected by the case.

No criminal charges have been filed against the Morgans. Chicago police are conducting a separate investigation, and a proposed class-action suit filed in Cook County Circuit Court in August accuses the chapel of fraud and of interfering with families' right to possess a relative's remains. Lawyers say the Morgans face more than 20 civil suits stemming from the funeral home and the earlier crematory case combined.

What happens next

The buildings department is expected to lay out its findings from Friday's inspection, including whether the structure poses enough of a hazard to warrant demolition, at the Oct. 29 hearing before Judge Rodriguez. The state regulator says it is pursuing permanent revocation of Johanna Morgan's license. Pritzker's administration has said it is examining whether the current division of oversight between the licensing agency and the comptroller's office should change, though no funeral-home-specific legislation has been introduced so far this session.