Grandmother's ashes lost in mail found in Elk Grove

The cremated remains of a Barrington woman's grandmother, which were lost for more than a week after shipping from Phoenix to Chicago, were located Thursday afternoon at the U.S. Postal Service's processing facility in Elk Grove Village.

The package containing the ashes of former Chicago resident Mabel Bink were successfully delivered to her daughter in South Holland shortly afterward, U.S. Postal Service spokesman Mark Reynolds said.

"The package is home and that's the most important thing," Reynolds said.

Bink's granddaughter, Beth Biancalana of Barrington, expressed relief Thursday for the end of what has been an anguishing time for the family.

"We're just so relieved and grateful," she said. "I probably heard about it sometime around 2:30 or 3 p.m."

Nevertheless, the Postal Service is continuing to investigate the incident to try to determine exactly what went wrong, Reynolds said.

Biancalana said her family began their uncomfortable vigil waiting for the recovery of the missing ashes relatively optimistic, but that their spirits gradually dwindled over time.

"I was hopeful in the first week, but then when this week began, we became more skeptical," she said.

Bink, 89, died June 18 in her then hometown of Mesa, Ariz. Her cremated ashes were supposed to be delivered to Chicago on July 19 for their planned burial a few days later.

Reynolds said the package carrying Bink's remains was scanned in when it arrived for placement on a Chicago-bound US Airways flight.

Reynolds said the package would normally have been scanned "every step of the way" so its owners and the Postal Service could track it, but was never scanned when the plane arrived in Chicago.

After arrival at the Postal Service's O'Hare facility, the package should have gone directly to a processing facility in Bedford Park and then to the South Holland post office for final delivery, Reynolds said.

But it went instead to the Elk Grove Village processing facility, where it's presumably been for the past 10 days. Reynolds said the investigation is concentrating on how that delivery mistake occurred.

Biancalana said her family feels generally forgiving of the Postal Service, but that the incident proves there's a definite need for improvement in its delivery system.

"We're all human and we make human errors, but we hope they re-evaluate their system because (the package) never got scanned," she said.