Officials Identify More Cremated Remains in Storage; Pilot Sought

DISCOVERY BAY, Calif. — Sheriff’s deputies continued Monday to try to identify thousands of boxes of cremated remains found at various storage facilities in the county.

Meanwhile, an arrest warrant was issued for the pilot who had promised to scatter the ashes, Al Vieira, 52, of Discovery Bay. Authorities are also seeking his girlfriend, Denise Hembree.

“The only ashes that he has dumped over the ocean are ashes that were dumped because the family was with him on the flight. We have ashes from the mid-1980s all the way up to last month,” said Sgt. Jerry Knutson of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department.

As of Monday afternoon, there was no sign of Vieira, although Knutson said it was possible that Hembree was in the area.

So far, investigators have found about 2,000 boxes of remains and have yet to tackle another storage facility that has about 3,000 to 5,000 boxes, Knutson said.

Most of the boxes are marked with inventory tags, but identification is still a slow process.

“It’s going to take probably more than a day just to separate everything by the mortuary and from there we’re averaging approximately 100 per hour,” he said.

Some of the boxes were found stacked around a cobweb-covered airplane in a Byron Airport hangar.

Most of the ashes came from funeral homes in the San Joaquin Valley, Knutson said. But some were from Contra Costa County and others were from as far north as Canada.

Investigators found a box dating from 1946 that contained the ashes of an infant that apparently were intended to be scattered with those of the mother, who died in 1991.

Vieira had been licensed by the state to scatter cremated human remains since 1986. He contracted with perhaps 200 funeral homes, offering bargain-basement prices of between $60 and $100.

The Neptune Society, which scatters ashes by boat, charges between $175 and $695.