What are you supposed to do with someone who’s taken lives in an act of mass murder and ends up dead himself? In the aftermath of such a tragedy, funeral rites for the killer aren’t exactly most people’s first concern. But when there’s a body, it has to go somewhere — and someone has to make that happen.
In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Peter Stefan was that someone. The director of the Graham, Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlor, in Watertown, Massachusetts, took on the unpleasant burden of handling the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers behind the bombing at the marathon’s finish line, which killed 3 and left hundreds injured. It was a job no one wanted at the time — and for which Stefan paid a heavy price. But, as he told VICE News, he’d do it again if he had to.
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“In this country, we bury people,” Stefan said at the time. He told VICE News, “We’re not dealing with the situation; we’re dealing with a dead body. Not what the dead body did.”
This segment originally aired June 13, 2017, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
