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From the beginning, the odds may have been stacked against Melissa Kay Weaver.
Both sides of her family had histories of alcoholism. She grew up poor, living in a Tennessee home where she and her siblings chopped wood and gathered coal for heat. As an adult, her own mother became her drinking buddy. After her mother died, Weaver lost herself in alcohol for more than a decade, one of her sisters said.
The end came Oct. 15, when the 41-year-old woman was being held at the Allen County Jail on her second drunken-driving charge in two years. She’d been pulled over with a blood-alcohol content of 0.33 percent, more than four times the limit for driving.
At some point, she was up and walking around her jail cell, crying, looking out a window. She rocked back and forth while sitting on a cot, and then she lied down and curled up, her pulse slowing. That’s how she died – on that cot with jail workers trying to revive her.
Sick in jail, carried away in a body bag, placed in a funeral home garage her family found appalling and hauled by them to Tennessee in the back of a pickup truck. That was Weaver’s exit.
Her family wants answers.
“Just because my sister was an alcoholic, that doesn’t mean she was not human,” said Tonia Hatfield, Weaver’s younger sister, whose brother and husband came to Fort Wayne from Tennessee to retrieve her sister’s body. “She deserved to be treated with respect.”
Weaver was born in Speedwell, Tenn., one of several children.
Her parents split up when she was about 11 years old. She and her older sister, Renee Weaver-Meeks, had first dibs on whom they wanted to live with. Weaver-Meeks chose their mother, so she wouldn’t be alone, and moved to Fort Wayne. Weaver stayed in Speedwell with her younger brother and sister.
“When my mom left my dad, Melissa was our mother,” Hatfield said. “She fed us, combed our hair and washed our clothes.”
Weaver moved to Fort Wayne about 23 years ago to be closer to her mother and other sister, Weaver-Meeks said. She worked odd jobs here and there but hadn’t earned an actual paycheck for several years. She gave birth to four children, whom she lost custody of at times, her sister said.
No matter what her problems were at any time, Weaver never forgot the birthdays of her children or family, Weaver-Meeks said.
At some point, the drinking began, and it worsened when Weaver’s mother died about 13 years ago.
“Some of us broke the cycle, some of us didn’t,” said Weaver-Meeks, speaking of her family’s history with alcohol. “My sister couldn’t.”
On Oct. 11, Weaver visited Weaver-Meeks for the last time. She was “stone-cold” sober, the first time in a long time Weaver-Meeks had seen her sister that way. The two women talked, told jokes, laughed and had a great time.
Three days later, about 10:30 p.m., Weaver was arrested on the drunken-driving charge. She told the arresting Fort Wayne police officer she had also taken a combination of Tylenol and codeine, which her family said she was allergic to.
Because of her high level of intoxication, Weaver was taken to a hospital, where she was cleared to enter the jail, according to a police report.
She appeared in court the next morning and then went back to the jail, according to court records. By afternoon she was sick, her family maintains.
The sheriff’s department permitted some members of Weaver’s family to watch a video of the last 40 to 45 minutes leading up to Weaver’s death.
“You could plainly tell she was ill,” Weaver-Meeks said. “She cried several times. You could see her wiping her face, crying, puking and taking bathroom breaks. You could tell she was very sick.”
At 3:09 p.m., a guard checked on Weaver, her sister said. At 3:11, nurses were called because her sister had a low pulse, according to Weaver-Meeks. The video ended with nurses and others coming into the room, Weaver-Meeks said.
The Allen County Sheriff’s Department denied The Journal Gazette’s request to review the video. Sheriff Ken Fries declined to talk about Weaver’s death.
If Weaver met indignities in life, as her family describes, she apparently faced them in death as well.
Low on money, her family in Tennessee decided to retrieve the body in a pickup truck with a shell covering the bed.
They made arrangements through a funeral home in Tennessee, which in turn contacted Siler Undertaking Co., also known as Siler Funeral Service, 8632 Decatur Road.
Tonia Hatfield said that when her husband and brother arrived to pick up the body, they were introduced to a “junkyard” full of beat-up cars. She claimed they had agreed to pick up the body in a container made for cremation but instead found Weaver in a body bag in a garage full of garbage and burnt buckets of motor oil.
“It was just mind-blowing,” said Calvin Weaver Jr., Weaver’s brother. “No one deserves that. An animal doesn’t deserve that. It left a scar on me.”
Steve Siler, owner of the funeral home, declined an interview request but did provide a written statement regarding his version of events. In it, Siler said families are usually not permitted into non-public areas of the business, such as the garage.
“We moved her to the garage for two reasons: convenience for the family (so they did not have to wait for me to get her from the prep room to the garage – they could get her back on the road to Tennessee faster.), and we had other people in the preparation room (out of respect for other families we do not allow public access to the prep room while it is occupied by other people.)”
Siler, who also noted remodeling at the business, wrote that he anticipated the family’s arrival, and Weaver’s body was in the garage for 20 minutes.
“We do not keep or store human remains in our garage,” he wrote. He said the container the family requested would not fit in their pickup truck, so she was kept in the body bag provided by the coroner’s office.
There is no state law or regulation on how a funeral home is to store bodies, according to Tracy Hicks, director of the State Board of Funeral and Cemetery Service. Siler’s funeral home director’s license is current, and he has no disciplinary actions against him, according to the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency.
Hatfield filed a complaint against Siler with the Indiana Better Business Bureau, the only complaint filed against the company on the BBB’s Web site.
Hatfield said she still owes money for the funeral service in Tennessee. Part of the cost for the funeral service included putting her sister’s remains in a mausoleum, which is usually done by the funeral home. To save money, Hatfield said her father, Calvin Weaver Sr., had to open and close the mausoleum, putting his daughter’s remains to rest himself.
“I know there’s nothing that can bring her back, but at least they could’ve helped,” Hatfield said, directing anger at the sheriff’s department and funeral home. “They wouldn’t want to lose one of their family members like that. They wouldn’t want one of their family members to suffer like that.”
