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Family: Mount Glenwood botched babys burial |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Saturday, 25 December 2004 |
Latest incident just one among litany of complaints about cemetery's conduct
December 22, 2004
By Allison Hantschel
Samuel Menard White didn't live to see his first Christmas. The 3-month-old boy died in his sleep, a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. His family intended to lay him to rest at the feet of his great-grandmother so that he wouldn't be alone in the cold and the dark.
The solemn parade of cars pulled up inside Mount Glenwood Memory Gardens' iron gate Saturday, and pallbearers took the tiny casket from the hearse.
When they got to the grave, they found no way of lowering him down, no cables or mechanism to place the casket in the ground. The minister who had come to pray over Samuel's body tried to place him in the grave himself.
But the hole cemetery workers dug was too small to hold him.
"The cemetery workers said they'd be back to fix it, and we stood there for 45 minutes under the tent, and they never came back," said Janie Hamilton of Chicago Heights, Samuel White's grandmother. "I couldn't bear to see my little grandbaby sitting out on the side of the grass like that, in the cold."
Family members finally went to the cemetery's offices and asked if anything could be done. Told there was nothing the cemetery could do to fix the problem immediately, the family's funeral director, Melvin Woods, put the casket back in the hearse and drove Samuel's body back to the Chicago Heights funeral home, where he remains.
Hamilton was heartbroken.
"They never even came out of their office until we raised so much hell," Hamilton said, crying. "We have had enough pain. He was such a beautiful baby, and I can't bear to think of him out in the cold like that."
Cemetery owner Jeannie Walsh blamed the funeral home, saying they never provided the correct size of the casket so the grave couldn't be dug to the correct dimensions.
"It is the responsibility of the funeral director," she said. "We don't know the size of the caskets. Baby funerals are few and far between."
Walsh said she had not spoken to the Hamilton family since the attempted burial Saturday, but she denied her workers acted insensitively or forced the Hamiltons to wait.
"The workers were out there," she said.
But Tuesday, upset by what they say was the high-handed attitude of the cemetery's employees to their plight, Hamilton and her daughter are looking for a new grave for Samuel.
Their story is the latest in a series of complaints about the Glenwood cemetery. In the past year, two families have exhumed their loved ones and moved them to other cemeteries. During the disinterment of Leora Bullocks, who was buried at Mount Glenwood two years ago, cemetery workers dug up two other graves before finding the right one.
When Tommie L. Johnson's family had his body moved in September, they said Walsh promised them they could watch as his grave was opened. However, when the family arrived, his casket was already dug up and waiting by the side of the cemetery road.
In 2000, eight families sued Mount Glenwood, then owned by Willard Timmer, Jeannie Walsh's father. They alleged that the Glenwood cemetery as well as another burial ground in Willow Springs, both primarily used by minority families, were run-down while Timmer's primarily white cemetery in Steger was pristine.
The lawsuit was settled and Timmer sold the cemeteries to his daughter and son-in-law in 2001. The Walshes promised to fix the flooding problems which plague the cemeteries and to keep up the properties. Three years later, however, conditions at both cemeteries remain poor.
The Illinois State Comptroller's Office regulates privately owned cemeteries, but there are few provisions in Illinois law to enforce cemetery upkeep. The state provides for no criminal penalties for neglect, only a series of administrative fines.
http://www.dailysouthtown.com/southtown/dsnews/221nd3.htm |
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