The family of John Jones now shares a tragic bond with the families of six Crandall Canyon mine disaster victims.
None will have the opportunity to lay their loved ones to rest, a void that greatly pained family members of the six coal miners buried by an implosion of the Crandall Canyon mine's walls on Aug. 6, 2007. A second violent outburst at the mine killed three would-be rescuers 10 days later, but their bodies were recovered and given traditional burials.
As an attorney for the survivors of many Crandall Canyon victims, Salt Lake City attorney Ed Havas learned the importance of body recovery and burial to the human grieving process.
"Being able to offer that last gesture of love and respect furthers the process of acceptance and closure," he said, extending his condolences to the Jones family. "It's important to have a place that is sanctified and hallowed, separate from any other, at which to pay respects.
"The [six] Crandall Canyon families, and now the Jones family, are deprived of having that closure, that special place reserved for them and no others. Though the mine, or in this case the cave, becomes a tomb, it's not the same. Memorials, markers, placards or other recognition, important and meaningful as they are, are no substitute," he added.
Ray Keeler, Phoenix-based editor of American Caving Accidents, a report that comes out annually, said he knows of only two instances -- one in Mexico, one in Great Britain -- in which the victims of caving accidents were left underground.
While hundreds of people have died in underground accidents in Utah over the past 150 years, there is no clear record of victims other than Jones being entombed permanently.
Stephanie Fitzsimons, new director of the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, said there is speculation that Utah's worst mining disaster, the 1900 explosion at the Winter Quarters coal mine outside of Scofield, involved many more victims than the 200 whose bodies were located.
But historian Allen Kent Powell, whose work has focused extensively on coal mining, said "while it was always claimed that not all of the bodies were removed from the mine, I don't know that any names have ever been provided of people who might have been buried inside."
The 27 victims of the 1984 Wilberg Mine fire were left underground for almost a year, but there was never any doubt they would be recovered -- and they were.
More doubt surrounded the case of Jerimiah Etherington, an 18-year-old Magna man who fell to his death in 1996 in the abandoned Honorine mine in Tooele County. Mine-rescue team members, who had braved the Wilberg Mine inferno, abandoned their efforts to retrieve Etherington's body, citing conditions too dangerous to proceed. But members of Etherington's family could not bear to leave him there and quietly went down and got him out.
