Paul Keane: Yale Graduate Offers Burial Plot For Tamerlan Tsarnaev's Body, Says 'I Don’t Care What A Pariah He Is' [PHOTO]
A Yale Divinity School graduate has offered the Tsarnaev family one of his burial plots.
On Monday, Paul Keane published a post on his blog, “The Anti-Yale,” that said he is offering the family of the Boston bombing suspect a plot next to his mother at the Mt. Carmel Burying Ground in Hamden, Conn.
“The only condition is that I do it in memory of my mother who taught Sunday School at the Mt. Carmel Congregational Church for twenty years and taught me to ’love thine enemy,’” he writes.
“I own the plot. No one can refuse me access,” he adds.
The 68-year-old retired public school teacher owns four burial plots in the cemetery, the New Haven Register reports. Two of the plots remain vacant. Keane, who lives in Vermont, says he has no use for them since purchasing ones there.
“This person, I don’t care what a pariah he is, everybody deserves a burial, so I’m willing to make this offer,” Keane said.
More than two weeks after his death, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family is struggling to find a place to bury him. City officials in Cambridge, Mass., said the city cemetery would reject Tsarnaev’s body, so would a Boston-area mosque and other private cemeteries.
Peter Stefan, the funeral director stuck with the controversial corpse, said he has received offers from out-of-state cemeteries, AP reports. He refused to give details out of concern that other funeral home would become targets of protests like his.
"Once the neighbors find out who's coming, they're going to come out," he said.
Mayor Scott Jackson hopes the offer will be free from the publicity the issue has garnered.
“I certainly hope if this offer is legitimate, and is legitimately being offered in the spirit of whom it claims to be, then I would guess it would actually be done in a different way — in a quiet way, in a Christian way, that requested or required no additional comment,” he told the New Haven Register.
Keane says he believes his decision is the right thing to do.
“I’ve only got one life to lead, and I’m going to be the guy who speaks up for the pariah, for the leper, for the hated person — and for the family in despair,” he said.
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