(At top: Todd Eckert, a licensed funeral director at Heffner Funeral Chapels & Crematory, with drugs that were fraudulently ordered using the company’s UPS account.)
By Thomas A. Parmalee
Most funeral directors worry about misplaced flowers, delayed death certificates or the occasional package delivered to the wrong chapel.
Ernie Heffner, owner of Heffner Funeral Chapels & Crematory with several locations in Pennsylvania, apparently has bigger problems.
For the second time in less than three years, the Pennsylvania funeral director has found himself unexpectedly connected to a massive cache of illegal drugs — first while scuba diving in the Florida Keys and now after nearly $90,000 worth of hashish and marijuana somehow landed at one of his funeral homes via a UPS delivery.
At this point, some of Heffner’s colleagues are wondering if lightning really can strike twice.
“Ernie, you seem to attract illegal drug shipments,” one co-worker joked after this latest incident, after police hauled a 27-pound box of narcotics out of the funeral home’s office.
A UPS Bill Raises Red Flags
The unusual chain of events began several days before the drugs ever appeared.
Jennifer Schaeffer, who handles accounting and various administrative tasks at the funeral home, was reviewing the funeral home’s weekly UPS statement when something immediately caught her attention: a charge exceeding $700 that no one recognized.
“It was really high to begin with,” Heffner recalled.
Schaeffer contacted UPS, which quickly determined the charge was fraudulent. The company believed the funeral home’s UPS account had been compromised, reversed the charge and instructed staff to change the account password immediately.
Problem solved — or so everyone thought.
The Box Nobody Ordered
Then July 24 came.
A UPS driver arrived at the firm’s Kenneth Road funeral chapel location in York carrying an unusually heavy brown box.
Apologizing for the late delivery after a busy route, he asked where he should leave it.
Like most businesses, the staff didn’t initially think much about it.
“When UPS delivers something, you don’t really question it,” Heffner said.
But after the driver left, employees quickly realized something wasn’t right. Nobody had ordered anything.
Senior funeral director Todd Eckert happened to walk through the office and was asked if he knew what the mysterious package contained.
He opened it.
“Uh-oh,” was essentially the reaction.
Inside were dozens of individually vacuum-sealed packages containing approximately 27 pounds of hashish and marijuana.
One employee later calculated the shipment weighed roughly 12,700 grams. At an estimated wholesale value of about $7 per gram, the drugs carried a street value approaching $89,000.
Needless to say, this wasn’t embalming fluid.
Time to Call the Police
The staff wasted little time deciding what to do.
“We didn’t want that in the building,” Heffner said.
Police were called and arrived to retrieve the shipment.
As an officer carried the massive box out of the funeral home, he couldn’t help but smile.
“When the police are notified of drugs found,” he remarked, “it’s usually a small sandwich bag,” Heffner recalled him saying.
Given the quantity involved, officers even suggested the case might ultimately be turned over to federal authorities.
The drugs had apparently originated in California and, according to information employees uncovered through online research, were initially destined for an alleged psychiatrist in Portugal before somehow being redirected to the funeral home’s UPS account and ultimately delivered to its front door.
Why the package ended up at a funeral home remains unknown, but it very well may have been because Heffner’s staff was so quick to flag the account and dispute the charge.
A Legal Gray Area? Not Really.
At first glance, the shipment’s apparent destination — a psychiatrist in Portugal — might make some readers wonder whether it was intended for legitimate medical use.
While Portugal is often cited as having some of the world’s most progressive drug policies, the reality is more nuanced.
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use, including cannabis and hashish. That means someone caught with a limited quantity for personal consumption generally faces administrative penalties rather than criminal prosecution. But decriminalization is not the same as legalization. Manufacturing, trafficking, importing and exporting cannabis products without authorization remain serious criminal offenses under Portuguese law and can carry lengthy prison sentences.
Nor would the shipment have been permissible simply because parts of the United States have legalized recreational or medical marijuana. Again, the law is nuanced, especially when considering interstate commerce.
It must also be noted that although dozens of states now allow some form of legal cannabis, marijuana remains illegal under U.S. federal law. UPS, in fact, expressly prohibits shipping marijuana through its network — even between states where it may otherwise be legal — and that prohibition extends to shipments purportedly intended for medical use.
Déjà Vu … But on a Dive Boat
For most people, discovering one major shipment of illegal drugs would make for a lifetime story.
For Heffner, it became a sequel.
In September 2023, while scuba diving in the Florida Keys with friends Kevin Bean, Matt Bailey (one of the popular panelists on The Graveyard Shift sponsored by Passare) and Jeff Bellomo, Heffner was aboard a dive boat traveling between dive sites when “Captain Ricky” — a former U.S. Coast Guard member — spotted a suspicious floating package in the water.
The captain immediately suspected what it might contain.
Two crew members wrestled the heavy, waterlogged box aboard while taking precautions because they were concerned it could contain fentanyl or other dangerous substances.
The captain contacted the Coast Guard, which instructed him to bring the package back to the dock at the end of the day.
Local law enforcement later recovered the box.
Only afterward did the divers learn what they had unknowingly transported.
According to news reports at the time, the floating package contained approximately $260,000 worth of hashish. Authorities believed it had likely been dumped by drug smugglers attempting to evade the Coast Guard.
The captain explained that smugglers frequently throw contraband overboard once they spot law enforcement. Coast Guard crews mark the GPS coordinates before pursuing the fleeing vessel, but ocean currents often carry the discarded cargo far from where it entered the water, making recovery difficult.
That abandoned shipment happened to drift directly into the path of Heffner’s dive boat.
Now, less than three years later, another substantial cache of drugs somehow found its way to him.
More Than an Unusual Story
The bizarre coincidence has generated plenty of laughs around the funeral home.
But behind the humor lies an important lesson for every funeral home.
Had Schaeffer not carefully reviewed the funeral home’s UPS statement, the fraudulent activity on the account might have gone unnoticed.
“I think people need to check their UPS accounts regularly,” Heffner said. “We can’t be the only business somebody is trying to hack.”
He encourages funeral home owners to routinely monitor all online business accounts —not just banking and credit cards, but shipping accounts, vendor portals and any platform capable of placing orders or generating charges.
Cybercriminals increasingly target business accounts that may not receive the same scrutiny as financial statements.
“We follow our bank accounts very closely,” Heffner said. “But all those electronic accounts you have —you need to be following those, too.”
Hopefully the Last Chapter
For someone whose career centers on helping families through life’s most difficult moments, Heffner has accumulated an unusually colorful collection of stories outside the arrangement office.
First came the quarter-million-dollar drug haul floating in the Atlantic.
Then came nearly $90,000 worth of narcotics delivered by UPS to one of his funeral homes.
You can also read about his adventures with an emotional support alligator named Wally, which received prominent coverage in the October 2019 issue of American Funeral Director.
Heffner’s team members are already jokingly wondering where the next shipment might turn up.
Heffner, meanwhile, would be perfectly content if his streak ended here.
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