Sorry to say, folks get buried in the wrong graves all the time… My father was buried in someone else’s gravesite – and had to be moved. A stranger was buried in a gravesite belonging to my sister – which made a problem, in that she planned to be buried next to her husband. Both of these situations led to bodies being moved. If these sisters get anywhere near the 25 million dollars asked for in their lawsuit, it will start an avalanche of such filings… Interesting…
The following teaser is from the July 12, 2011 Reuters website.
(Reuters) – Evelyn and Hortense Edwards spent two decades visiting what they thought was their mother’s grave in a New Jersey cemetery only to discover it contained the remains of a stranger, according to court papers.
Now, the sisters are suing, seeking want $25 million in damages from Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, for emotional distress caused when they learned that their mother, Beatrice Williams, had been buried in the wrong plot.
“It was devastating for them,” Mark Crawford, the sisters’ attorney, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
He said they only recently discovered the mix-up after complaining to the cemetery that what they thought was their mother’s grave, which they visit regularly, was falling into disrepair. An employee looked up the plot in question.
“She said, ‘There’s a man buried there,’ and they said, ‘What do you mean there’s a man buried there?'” Crawford said.
The complaint filed in Brooklyn Federal Court says the cemetery has acknowledged that the plot location in the sisters’ paperwork — Section 52, Row 20, Grave 103 — was incorrect.
