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In late December, Clementine Sanders called her son at Coalinga State Hospital to make sure he had received her Christmas card. That’s when his bunkmates informed her that her son, 58-year-old Shannon Starr, had died three weeks earlier. “I was just totally shocked,” she says. “Nobody called me.”
Since then, she says, none of her messages to staff or reception have been returned. “I still wasn’t notified and I still haven’t heard from the [hospital],” she says.
When Sanders and her daughter instead sought out information from the Fresno County Coroner’s Office, they learned that Starr’s body had already been cremated and his ashes disposed of off the coast of San Luis Obispo County. “I’m just numb. I don’t know what to do,” Sanders says. “I’m upset. I don’t know exactly who to be upset with, except for them, and I can’t talk with them.”