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Family sues cemetery, manager |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 15 December 2004 |
By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
Dec 13, 2004
DURHAM -- A Durham cemetery and its manager are being sued for allegedly mishandling a burial four years ago and allowing body fluids to leak from a crypt, horrifying the dead woman's family.
The unusual lawsuit, filed Monday in Durham County Superior Court, also says cemetery officials removed the body and cleaned the crypt without telling the family.
It names Woodlawn Memorial Gardens of North Carolina Inc. and Boscoe Fulcher as defendants. Fulcher is described in legal documents as the vice president of the corporation and the general manager of Oak Grove Memorial Gardens in Durham, where the burial allegedly took place.
"I don't have any comment," Fulcher told The Herald-Sun.
Plaintiffs in the case are Terri Watkins and Shari Heil, the daughters of Faye Beddingfield, whose body fluids allegedly leaked after her burial at Oak Grove in November 2000.
According to the lawsuit, filed by Durham lawyers David Alexander and Bill Goldston, Beddingfield died at age 60 after a lengthy illness. The plaintiffs then entered into an $11,729 contract with Woodlawn for two mausoleum crypts at Oak Grove, according to the suit.
One crypt was for Beddingfield and the other for her husband. Among other things, the contract included the price of the mausoleum spaces, as well as the fees for opening and closing the graves, the suit says.
Beddingfield was buried on Nov. 15, 2000, the suit adds.
Not long afterward, Heil was at the grave to replace flowers when she stepped into "a puddle of strange looking fluid on the concrete," the suit alleges.
Then, according to the suit, Watkins was driving past the cemetery when she noticed two workers with a power washer at her mother's section of the mausoleum.
"To her shock and horror, she saw that the two maintenance workers had disinterred the casket of her mother from the crypt and were power washing the casket and the inside of her mother's crypt," the suit says.
Watkins was told that her mother's casket was leaking and people "were complaining about the smell," the suit adds.
Once cemetery employees finished power-washing the crypt, they re-interred Beddingfield's remains and used caulk and duct tape to seal it, the suit says.
Fulcher subsequently admitted to a local television station that "the inside [of the crypt] was not sealed right," the suit says.
But that was not the end of it, the suit complains.
The crypt continued leaking, so Beddingfield's remains were removed again and placed in a new casket, legal documents allege. She was buried once more, the documents say.
Among other things, the lawsuit contends that the defendants negligently failed to seal the crypt properly the first time, and violated state health laws by failing to close the cemetery before removing Beddingfield's body from its grave. The cemetery also failed to "properly contain, clean and dispose of hazardous waste from the remains of a human body," the suit contends.
In addition, the defendants unlawfully disinterred Beddingfield's remains without telling the family or getting their consent or the consent of a judge, the suit adds.
Describing the defendants' alleged actions as "willful or wanton conduct," the suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for the plaintiffs.
A lawsuit represents only one side of a dispute, however. The defendants will be able to present their side later in court.
http://www.herald-sun.com/durham/4-555005.html |
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