Tsarnaev Body May Have A Taker, Man Offers Plot

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body remains unburied, and his family and funeral home alike have thus far been unable to locate a willing cemetery to allow burial of the suspected Boston bomber’s corpse.

While Tsarnaev’s body presents a logistical challenge, it also presents a strange quandary regarding assumed risk — any burial ground willing to accept the family as a client also risks upsetting current and future customers by opening the surrounding plots to risk of vandalism or simply negative attention. (Generally an undesirable thing for the mourning and grieving.)

But Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have found a grave, as a Yale grad offered up a spot at a Mt. Carmel cemetery with a single condition.

On his blog, Paul Douglas Keane explains that an available space next to his mother’s grave is open to the Tsarnaev family, with a simple condition. He writes:

“I am willing to donate a burial plot next to my mother in Mt. Carmel Burying Ground to the Tsarnaev family if they cannot obtain a plot. The only condition is that I do it in memory of my mother who taught Sunday School at the Mt. Carmel Congregational Church for twenty years and taught me to ‘love thine enemy.’ ”

Keane adds:

“I own the plot. No one can refuse me access.”

Keane tells the New Hampshire Register that his mother was the type of person who, when presented with a quandary like that posed by Tsarnaev’s body, would “step right into the middle of a controversy like this and tell the people to do the right thing.”

He adds:

“I don’t care how despicable and hateful this man’s behavior was in his lifetime,” Keane said. “He’s dead, and his body deserves a resting place just like everyone’s body deserves a resting place.”

The cemetery’s owners say that it’s up to Keane, not them, whether Tsarnaev’s body can be buried there since he owns the plot.