Kansas County Duty to Bury an Indigent Veteran

Section 73-304 places a duty, not a discretion, on the county commissioners of every Kansas county. They shall cause to be decently interred the body of any honorably discharged person who served in the armed forces during a named conflict, or the body of the spouse or parent of such a person, who dies without leaving sufficient means to defray funeral expenses. The dignity provision is the heart of it. Such burial shall not be made in any cemetery or burial ground, or portion of a burial ground, used exclusively for the burial of pauper dead. The same section also directs commissioners to cause the removal of the body of any qualifying veteran already buried in grounds reserved exclusively for pauper dead to another portion of a cemetery. That is a reinterment duty for burials that already happened. Where surviving relatives wish to conduct the funeral themselves but are unable or unwilling to pay, they are permitted to do so and the expense is paid by the county in the amount and manner the general assistance provisions set. The limitation to watch is the list of conflicts. The section names the Spanish-American War, the Philippine insurrection, the expedition to China, World War I, World War II, and service with the armed forces during military, naval and air operations in Korea or other places under the flags of the United States and the United Nations or under the flag of the United States alone. The section was last amended in 1957. On its face the enumerated wars stop before Vietnam, and the catch-all clause about "other places under the flags of the United States and the United Nations or under the flag of the United States alone" is doing all the work for every conflict since. Whether a given county reads that clause to cover a veteran of Vietnam, the Gulf, Iraq or Afghanistan is a question of local practice rather than of settled text, and this catalog cannot tell a family in advance which way a particular board will go. The other thing to check first is the federal and state alternatives, which are usually better. A VA burial allowance may be payable, interment in a Kansas state veterans cemetery or a national cemetery is free for an eligible veteran, and a government headstone or marker is provided. Section 73-304 is the floor beneath all of that, for the veteran who fits none of it. Related sections in the same article cover the burial of Union soldiers, sailors and marines and their wives or widows, the removal of remains of deceased ex-soldiers from an abandoned cemetery or pauper burying ground, and the burial of veterans dying while inmates of state charitable institutions.