The ashes of a local veteran will finally be laid to rest after a maintenance worker found them in an apartment complex dumpster last week.

“To me it’s gross,” said Dianne Ford, a parking enforcement officer in Renton who took the remains to Mount Olivet Cemetery, where they had been cremated. “How can you dispose of a person in the garbage?”

Michael Gregory Seabrooks, born Jan. 22, 1954, will be laid to rest at the Tahoma National Cemetery, said Tom Yokes, the cemetery floorman.

“This happens maybe once or twice a year and not just in Renton,” said Jim Colt, Mount Olivet manager.

But for the national cemetery, it’s a very unusual case.

Two years ago the family held a memorial service for Seabrooks but took the remains home undecided about whether to bury them, Yokes said.

The national cemetery called the family last month and asked if they had decided. The family said they’d call when they made their decision, he said.

A maintenance worker found the remains last week while preparing the dumpsters for garbage pickup near the 200 block of Southwest Fifth Place, Ford said.

The maintenance manager approached Ford, who works for the Renton Police Department, as she was writing handicap parking tickets, she said.

“We thought it was a trophy. Then we thought, ‘Man, it has a guy’s name on it’,” she said. “The poor guy got dumped.”

The box the remains were in led them to Mount Olivet.

The cemetery tried to contact Seabrook’s large family without success, and decided to send the remains to the national cemetery, where they had already been approved for a free burial, Colt said.

“We’re not responsible for it, but since we already have his documentation, we’ll conduct a burial at the request of a funeral home,” Yokes said.

If Seabrooks wasn’t a veteran, Mount Olivet would have placed the urn in one of its crypts, Colt said.

Mount Olivet takes in hundreds of unclaimed remains from the King County medical examiner once a year for a multi-cultural burial service.

“I guess we’re the people who don’t mind taking care of it,” he said.

It’s still unclear how the remains ended up in the dumpster or who’s responsible.

It’s not illegal to dump cremains in the garbage, and so police aren’t investigating, said Renton Police Department spokesperson Terri Vickers.

“I told people, ‘I’m going to be careful where I put my body, or I might end up in the garbage’,” Ford said.