Wednesday, Aug. 4, 1999 | 11:01 a.m.
On the edge of a cemetery at the edge of downtown, another man who lived on society's fringes was laid to rest in a pauper's grave Tuesday without a single mourner standing by.
His was one of more than 700 such solitary burials Clark County will pay for this year. Las Vegas is a transient town where such lonely endings are increasingly common.
"The town seems to attract them. They are estranged from their families for some reason," Mitch Amos, a Las Vegas funeral director, said Tuesday. "It seems like that happens an awful lot."
It happened again Tuesday afternoon as no one prayed aloud for Arthur Bennett when his plain, particle-board coffin was lowered into the plot at Woodlawn Cemetery. No one wept. His family didn't show up.
Unlike most pauper's burials, Bennett's demise was anything but obscure. He had made national headlines of the sort that made mourners shy away.
His family didn't come because they thought they already had buried him once. They came the first time when he was laid to rest with military honors back in 1994. It was right after the U.S. Marine staff sergeant faked his own death to escape facing a court-martial on charges of sexually abusing the children of fellow Marines in Arizona and Japan.
He was found hiding out in Utah and arrested again. This time, Bennett hanged himself with a bed sheet in his Clark County Detention Center cell the day before he faced court martial on sexual assault and desertion charges.
This time, cemetery workers lowered a concrete dome over his casket, dumped a shovelful of dirt from a front-end loader on top and pounded a plain brass plate into the ground next to the hole.
It was inscribed only with Bennett's name and the years of his birth and death -- just like the hundreds of other markers for the impoverished that dot various sections of Woodlawn.
In the budget year that ended in June, Clark County Social Services paid for 522 burials and 235 cremations, said Mary Ann Salmon, the social service manager whose department oversees such burials.
"With the population increase, they tend to go up every year," Salmon said. "We seem to have more during the holiday times."
Burials like Bennett's cost $720, and cremations with burial of the remains cost $420. Cremations can only be done when a relative is willing to sign a release. Otherwise, the county opts for a regular burial.
The Clark County coroner's office has five funeral homes on a rotation list to handle such cases. It was Hite's Funeral Home's turn when it came time to bury Bennett, whose relatives refused to pay for his services.
Jean Hite said her family's funeral home handles about half a dozen social services burials a month. But she hasn't seen any like Bennett's -- with no words for the dead.
"No. No, thank God. I've never seen one like this," Hite said.
Arrangements are left to the families and the funeral homes, Salmon said. Most of the time, at least one family member can be found.
But not always, said Vince Herrera, a funeral director at Bunkers Mortuaries and Cemeteries. He recalled many cases in which he and his coworkers have buried John and Jane Does.
"I could tell you some stories that would bring tears to your eyes. Once a woman called and found out her son was buried here two years ago," Herrera said. "It happens more often than you would think. Las Vegas is a transient town."
It is hard every time they have to bury someone without even a proper name or birth date to put on the brass plate, he said.
"You wonder what happened to their friends," Herrera said. "Sometimes, I don't even have enough information to complete a death certificate. How can we go through life and then die and not know anybody out there?"
It likely happens more often in Las Vegas because the town's fast-paced, money-laced image attracts the down-and-out. They come here hoping their luck will turn, said Amos, another Bunkers funeral director.
Cemeteries throughout the area reserve certain sections for pauper's graves, said Leonard Schlener, a Woodlawn Cemetery worker who helped bury Bennett.
The brass markers, which are about 5-inches wide and 9-inches long, are intended to be temporary. Some families later replace them with regular headstones when they can come up with the money, Schlener said.
However, many do not.
"A lot of the people here don't have any family," Schlener said, standing next to the third section that Woodlawn has reserved for indigent graves. "Mostly (the markers) get covered up over the years with grass or dirt, or they deteriorate.
"There are some of them out there that go back to the 60s. But the rest of them are covered over," Schlener said.
He pointed across the walkway to an unblemished field of grass.
"It looks just like that over there." The graves are logged on plot maps so they can be found decades later even if the markers have disappeared.
But first someone has to care enough to look.
Herrera said it is hard to see someone pass from life so unceremoniously. That's why he always manages to say a short prayer for those he buries, even if no one else comes and no one knows the person's name.
"You just ask almighty God to take the people back home," Herrera said. "He gave them to us. He doesn't make any junk."
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