Little Girl, Rose Still In Hand, Found In Coffin Beneath Sf Home

On May 9, workers at the home in the Lone Mountain neighborhood in the Richmond District discovered the casket and called authorities. The unidentified girl, who appeared to be about 3, is believed to be one of about 30,000 people who were buried at the old Odd Fellows Cemetery in San Francisco. The bodies were moved to a common burial plot in Colma around 1920, after all the city’s graveyards were ordered to make way for the living. Somehow, the workers in charge of moving the Odd Fellows occupants left this girl behind. “She’s wearing a long white dress,” said Elissa Davey, the founder of the Garden of Innocence charity which, for two decades, has buried the bodies of unidentified children in California. The medical examiner’s office told her the body was her responsibility, even though the error that left the coffin beneath her garage was not. “It didn’t seem right,” said Karner, who markets cookies for a living and whose family has lived in the home since 1976. In desperation, with the coffin lying above ground in her back yard, she called authorities at City Hall. [...] Davey, who works out of her office near San Diego, arranged for the body to be picked up and stored, temporarily, in a mortuary refrigerator in Fresno. “We had to pick her up,” said Davey, whose organization has arranged for the burials of 327 unidentified children at 11 cemeteries and other plots of land throughout California. If people find out she’s lying at a construction site with no one around at night, you can bet somebody is going to steal her.