For some families it's like having a replay of a death'all over again'
Authorities say they don't know when the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Ill., closed since July 10, will reopen.
July 12, 2009
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY
ALSIP, Ill. — Two weeks after Charlotte Williams learned that graves at Burr Oak Cemetery had been desecrated, she's still waiting to find out what happened to the remains of her murdered brother and infant sister, whose graves she believes were among hundreds that were violated.
The once-prestigious African-American cemetery in this Chicago suburb closed to the public on July 10. A sheriff's deputy guards the entrance. Dozens of small orange flags near gravesites hint at the vast and complex investigation underway inside.
Four former cemetery employees are accused of reselling burial plots and splitting the $300,000 they made. To make room for new burials, they allegedly excavated some caskets and dumped human remains and headstones in an unused part of the cemetery. They also allegedly crushed some caskets into the ground and buried new ones on top of them.
Carolyn Towns, 49; Keith Nicks, 45; Terrence Nicks, 39; and Maurice Dailey, 59, are charged with one felony count of dismembering a human body and face up to 30 years in prison if convicted. They are being held in protective custody, separated from other detainees, and a preliminary hearing is set for Aug. 6.
The wait for news is agonizing, says Williams, a volunteer jail chaplain from Markham, Ill. The headstone marking the spot where her brother Leporter Riley was buried after his murder in 1978 is gone. She also fears that the grave of her sister Tina Lee, who was 3 months old when she died in 1968, was disturbed.
"It's like we've got to cope with a death all over again," she says.
Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office, says investigators have recovered about 200 pieces of bones and fragments from two sections of the 150-acre cemetery.
"We have to literally go through the site by hand," he says, and the bones might never be identified.
Sifting for evidence
About 25 members of FBI evidence-recovery teams, including some who worked on the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the 9/11 crash of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, are at the crime scene, says FBI spokesman Ross Rice.
The search is still "in the beginning stages," Rice says, and it's impossible to estimate how long the probe will take.
Other developments:
• A Cemetery Oversight Task Force appointed by Gov. Pat Quinn holds its first hearing today. Chairwoman Patricia Brown Holmes says the panel will recommend regulatory and legislative changes by Sept. 15.
"Where did our system break down?" asks Holmes, a former judge whose father and infant brother are buried at Burr Oak. She doesn't know whether their graves were affected.
• More than 200 families plan to file a class-action lawsuit against the cemetery's owners, Perpetua Holdings of Illinois. "There's a lot of grief, bewilderment and anger" among families, says Paul Shuldiner, lead attorney in the class-action effort.
• A hearing on the revocation of the cemetery's license is set for Friday.
• Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan have sued Perpetua, accusing it of consumer fraud and violations of state burial laws.
• The Cook County Board of Commissioners voted Tuesday to sue the cemetery's owners to recover about $350,000 the county has spent on the investigation.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says he doesn't know when the cemetery will reopen.
His office will soon launch a website with photos of all headstones in the cemetery, including those that were not tampered with, to help families determine the status of relatives' graves.
Dart has said that as many as 300 graves were disturbed. His spokesman, Steve Patterson, says more than 55,000 people have contacted the sheriff's department about family members buried at Burr Oak.
Blues singers Dinah Washington and Willie Dixon, and Emmett Till, an icon of the civil rights movement, are among about 100,000 people buried at Burr Oak. Their graves are intact.
Williams says people who are mourning the indignities the remains of their loved ones might have endured at Burr Oak need information from investigators and assurances that the culprits will be punished.
Then, says, "we truly do have to forgive these people for what they've done. To hold on to bitterness will only cause us more heartache."
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