Cemetery Investigation Adds to Families’ Grief

Wiping tears from her eyes and clutching a post for support, Vonsheena Flannagan leaned over the fence around Woodlawn Cemetery in Compton and tried desperately to spot her mother’s grave.

“That’s where she’s supposed to be,” Flannagan said Wednesday, pointing to a tidy row of headstones. “But we don’t know for sure.”

The 25-acre cemetery was shut down Tuesday by state inspectors who reported finding pieces of bones and caskets scattered across its grounds. The investigation by the Cemetery and Funeral Bureau also found that the cemetery had unlawfully converted single-burial graves to multiple graves.

On Wednesday, Flannagan and about 50 other people gathered outside the 120-year-old cemetery’s locked gates, seeking information about the remains of their loved ones.

Among the most distraught was Flannagan. When her mother was buried 11 years ago, the family was initially told that the grave was in the west end of the cemetery, she recalled.

But the headstone was never installed and a year later cemetery officials informed relatives that the burial was actually in a different section of the cemetery, Flannagan said. So family members began to visit the new location.

“We don’t know what happened,” she said.

As she spoke, archeologists and state cemetery regulators worked inside the cemetery, using wheelbarrows, shovels and earth sifters. Resembling miners panning for gold, they sifted earth through mesh screens, searching for pieces of bone.

State inspectors said they found that some graves had been converted from single to multiple grave sites without proper documentation. When previously interred remains were disturbed, the cemetery sometimes failed to properly reinter all the remains, officials said. Woodlawn also allegedly continued to sell burials plots although it did not have any empty grave sites.

“We are still trying to assess the situation to see what we are dealing with,” said Tracey Weatherby, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the funeral bureau.

The cemetery operator, Evergreen Memorial Care, withheld comment, referring reporters’ calls Wednesday to the consumer affairs agency.

State inspectors made their discoveries during an unrelated inspection of the cemetery in February. The cemetery will remain closed until the site is cleaned up and the body parts are identified.

An administrative hearing will be held to determine whether the owners of the cemetery will be allowed to keep their state licenses. The state had no record of prior disciplinary action against the cemetery.

Some family members, kept outside the cemetery’s gates, used binoculars Wednesday to try to locate loved ones’ headstones, while others looked on with shock.

“My son. My only son,” sobbed Betty Brown, wiping tears away.

Brown said she buried her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother at Woodlawn.

When it came time to bury her 32-year-old son, who was murdered in March 1999, she said, she was surprised when told that his casket would be the third and final casket placed in one grave site. Then, after he was buried, cemetery officials did not immediately close the grave, she said.

“I’ve been crying over him every day since he was killed, and now this,” she said. “What do we do with their bodies now?”

From his backyard, which abuts the cemetery, Felix Gonzalez watched the forensic archeologists filling buckets with their findings.

Gonzalez said he and his neighbors had suspected for a long time that something was wrong at the cemetery. ‘They buried a lot of people in the same grave,” he said. “We saw them moving bodies sometimes.”

The Woodlawn disclosures are similar to those that triggered earlier legal action against another southeast Los Angeles County cemetery.

In a case involving Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs and affiliated mortuaries, state inspectors in 1995 said they discovered that Paradise workers routinely dug up caskets to resell sites, sometimes stacking caskets in a single grave. The cemetery’s owner and two family members received jail sentences in criminal actions arising from the investigation.

Civil actions, which concluded last year, resulted in payouts by insurance companies of $8.4 million to families and lawyers and the creation of a maintenance trust fund for Paradise.

Douglas Wicks, a Los Angeles lawyer who represented family members in Paradise cases, predicted a new round of lawsuits stemming from the latest disclosures.

“Five years ago, we had these same events--there were a lot of politicians who came out and made a lot of promises,” said Wicks, who showed up at Woodlawn with a client, Ardonis Arnwine, whose niece and nephew are buried in the Compton cemetery. “The question is: What is going to be done?”