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Sunny. High around 100F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph..

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 62F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph.

Lodi police detectives are investigating how the remains of a deceased child were misplaced at a local funeral home last month, leaving the parents devastated.

The Lodi Police Department said it received a report from Cherokee Memorial Funeral Home on Saturday afternoon that the remains were missing from a storage facility at the business located at Harney Lane and Highway 99.

Stockton resident Mari Jo Planas gave birth to a stillborn girl last month, and she and her boyfriend Everardo Muñoz took their daughter to Cherokee Memorial for burial.

Funeral services were scheduled for Monday. But two days prior, Planas said, representatives from Cherokee Memorial contacted them with disturbing news.

“They came to my house and tried to explain what happened,” Planas said. “They couldn’t find her body, and they didn’t know it had been gone since July 5. It was a whole month before they realized anything.”

Planas said she and Muñoz accompanied staff to the funeral home, where they met with Lodi detectives.

Funeral home staff, detectives and Planas and Muñoz viewed surveillance video footage to determine how the remains went missing, she said.

“After reviewing video footage from the funeral home, it was discovered that an employee from a contracted transport service discarded the box containing the fetus into a waste container two weeks prior to a report being made,” police said Monday. “During those two weeks, all waste containers have been emptied and transported by the waste collection company.”

Planas said the video showed two men from the contracted company moving bags around, one of which contained her daughter.

On the video, one of the employees appears to place the body bag on a stretcher, open it and remove a white object Planas believes was the blanket in which her daughter was wrapped, she said.

He then appears to remove her daughter’s body from the bag and “threw her” into a nearby trash can, Planas said.

“They promised me and my boyfriend that her body was going to be protected and safe with them,” Planas said. “It’s like we can’t trust anybody again. It’s just hard to process this whole thing.”

The funeral home said it could not discuss specifics of the investigation, but issued a media statement about the incident.

“Cherokee Memorial is aware of a situation that has arisen with a grieving family we are currently serving,” it said. “We are working closely with the family, law enforcement and others involved to investigate the incident and resolve the issue quickly.”

Police said the investigation is still in its preliminary stages, and updates would be provided as they become available.

“We never thought our daughter would pass away, and we never thought something like this would happen,” Planas said. “We just want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

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