No One Wants To Bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

[Jim Lane]

61. I stand with my friend, Peter Stefan.

I got to know him after my father's death. Dad had worked at the Public Inebriate Program (later People in Peril as it expanded to handle drug addicts). The PiP shelter wasn't exactly popular with the neighbors in its Main South area in Worcester, but Peter Stefan, whose funeral home is nearby, was one of those who stood up for it. Both my father and my mother had their funeral services there.

From another article about this fracas:

Stefan is well-known in the Main South neighborhood as someone who will take in anyone in need of funeral services no matter who they are or how much money they have. He is well recognized for the work he did during the height of the AIDS epidemic when other funeral directors would not take in and help bury the bodies of of people who died after a battle with AIDS.

"I can't control the circumstances of someone's death, what they've done or how they died," said Stefan. "Back years ago back when the AIDS epidemic first started, nobody would take the AIDS people. I took them right from the beginning."

Stefan said he has helped pay for funerals for many poor families over the years and if he had to, he would help with Tsarnaev's funeral as well.

"I bury more poor people than anybody here in the entire state," said Stefan. "That's well known, and it's not a matter of money. Sometimes you do what you have to do. If everything was predicated on money there are a lot of things I wouldn't be doing." (from "Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev's funeral arrangements being made by Worcester's Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Home")

My father and mother would both have been proud to know that the home that handled their services was sticking up for decent treatment for the most despised man in America.