OCEAN CITY, NJ – Paulette Eva Rose Tricoche died last summer at the age of 71.
The Reidsville, Georgia, woman was cremated and her ashes placed in a purple urn, engraved with her dates of birth and death, along with a simple message: “In Loving Memory Mom.”
On October 7, that urn arrived in Ocean City, New Jersey, more than 800 miles away from the Georgia town 5,000 west of Savannah.
Ryan Leonard, 39, said Friday that his children found the urn in sea grass outside their home.
Jackson, 7, and Reid, 3, were sifting through “sea grass that had washed up in the storm,” Leonard said in an interview Friday.
He came across other random things like little oxen and a flip flop.
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The family lives right on the bay and is familiar with things washing up there, “especially things that fall off a boat into the lagoon: tags and surfboards, that sort of thing,” but never anything so strange as an urn
Leonard found an obituary for Tricoche online, but couldn’t find anything about a family. He reached out to the funeral home that posted the obituary.
On Saturday, Oct. 8, Bradley B. Anderson of Bradley B. Anderson Funeral Home said a check of his records indicated that Tricoche was originally from Cape May Court House, New Jersey, but was living in Macon, Georgia, when he died. .
Her remains were sent to a family member in Cape May County last summer, said Anderson, whose funeral home is also a regional, low-cost crematory.
“My guess is that he tried to do a burial at sea and he washed up,” he said.
Anderson said he was trying to put the family member in touch with Leonard so they could figure out the next steps.
For now, the Leonards are keeping the urn in their garage.
