HOLLAND, Mich. (AP) - Erwin Jordan's final resting place will be the Autumn Hills Landfill in southwestern Michigan, at least as far as his children are concerned.

But his brother wants the search for his body to continue, after it was mistakenly taken from a Holland funeral home by the trash man.

"The kids can say all they want. I'm just as close to my brother as they are to him," Stuart Jordan of Otsego told The Grand Rapids Press. "I don't care who is to blame, but that body should be found."

"I don't want my brother just left in the dump."

Police said Tuesday that they would discontinue searching the Zeeland Township landfill at the request of Jordan's children. They looked for the Holland man's body all day Friday and Saturday, but the children said in a statement that they did not want the searchers' safety or health jeopardized for what authorities said was only a small chance of success.

Medical officials said Erwin Jordan, 66, died Dec. 20 of heart disease. His body was put in a garage inside a zipped body bag and white cremation box while the funeral home awaited family permission to proceed with burial or cremation.

But it was picked up by Priority Arrowaste of Zeeland Township on Jan. 5, and officials believe it was left at the dump around 6 a.m. Friday.

Michigan's Board of Mortuary Science, which licenses funeral homes and directors, will investigate how the body made it into the trash truck.

Another state agency, the Department of Environmental Quality, said the landfill must now continue the search.

"Bodies cannot go to a landfill under any circumstances. The burden is on the landfill operator to find (the body)," Ben Okwumabua, a supervisor in the department's Solid Waste Bureau in Southern Michigan, told The Holland Sentinel.

Waste Management, which runs the dump, said it is cooperating.

John Sterenberg, co-owner of the funeral home, said it stores bodies in the locked garage during winter months when a refrigeration unit is full. The garage keeps the bodies below 40 degrees, he said.

The funeral home stores medical waste and other materials for recycling on the opposite side of the garage.

Police said the trash man noticed the container holding Jordan's body a week earlier but left it. On Jan. 5, he called a dispatcher and was told to load it.

Terry Nienhuis, Priority Arrowaste general manager, said the proximity of the box to trash containers led to confusion. He offered sympathy to Jordan's family, but said a company investigation concluded that it did not vary from its normal course of business at the funeral home.

The funeral home saw that the body was missing on Friday morning and notified police, who isolated a 300-by-400-foot area of the huge landfill to search.

But about 70 trucks had dumped loads in the same place since 6 a.m. Officers, landfill workers and a state police cadaver dog searched the trash without success.