California girls bake grandfather's ashes into cookies, hand them out at school

  • 20/10/2018
Chocolate cookies - won't get you in trouble with the police.
Chocolate cookies - won't get you in trouble with the police. Photo credit: Getty

A high school student in California allegedly baked her grandfather's ashes into cookies and gave them out at school.

The incident happened at Da Vinci Charter Academy in Davis, a town west of Sacramento, earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Two unrelated female students reportedly handed out the cookies, telling other students they contained a "special ingredient".

One student told local media he thought it was marijuana, until one of the girls showed him her grandfather's urn.

Despite containing "tiny grey flecks", Andy Knox said there was no way to tell it was human remains.

"If you ever ate sand as a kid, you know, you can kind of feel it crunching in between your teeth, so there was a little tiny bit of that," he told KCRA-TV.

Police said the allegations seem credible, and some students ate the cookies even though they knew what was allegedly in them.

They're currently now trying to figure out what laws cover baking human remains into food and tricking people into eating them.

The two students have reportedly been cooperating with the investigation.

Microbiologist Rolf Halden of Arizona State University told LiveScience there shouldn't be any health risks.

"Cremation essentially mineralises the human body and produces ashes that are rich in carbon and not much of a health concern… Proper cremation will remove all infectious properties of the remains, thus allowing people to take the ashes home and store them in living spaces."

He said the main risk would be if the deceased had fillings that hadn't been removed from the body prior to cremation.

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