After the tragic murder of their loved one, the family of a young man in Texas has another reason to grieve, as one of the things they hoped would help them keep his memory alive was lost.
Kenneth Thomas, a 19-year-old Texas man, was killed during a robbery in the Fifth Ward area of Houston on August 26. As they prepared to lay him to rest, his heartbroken family says they asked Oasis Funeral and Cremation to save Thomas’ hair so some of them could weave his hair, which was styled in wicks, with theirs as a way to honor him. But when they finally received the hair from the funeral home, the family quickly realized it was not Kenneth’s – something that made them wonder whether or not the ashes they received were actually his.
“Makes us question everything, even his ashes,” Thomas’ cousin, Lakisha Johnson said. “Is this really him in this urn? We need to know that. Because if that’s not him in the urn, who is it?”
Johnson added that situation is especially painful for the family, because holding on to his hair was so important to them.
“We don’t have that piece of him. That was the only part of him that we decided to keep, that we wanted to keep in the family, to keep him alive. We don’t have it, and it hurts. It is not right at the end of the day,” she said.
Tanya Roberson, the owner of Oasis Funeral and Cremation, admitted to Houston’s ABC 13 News that the hair the Thomas family received was not Kenneth’s, but that of another person whose hair was styled similarly. The mix-up, she says, likely happened because of construction that was happening onsite at the time. Roberson added that she is still trying to locate Kenneth’s hair for his family.
“I take accountability for the issue that happened, I do,” Roberson said. “As much as you try to do everything perfect, sometimes things still slip between the cracks.”