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Man says cemetery replaced mother’s grave with another’s
Dover has spent a year trying to find out what happened. Was his mother’s body removed after the burial? Or was the man’s tomb just placed right on top of her?
The Bradenton man is now suing a funeral home looking for some answers. It is the latest controversy for a Sarasota cemetery with such poor record-keeping that new burials were suspended this year.
Dover is not the only one with a story of finding a stranger’s grave on top of a relative’s remains in Galilee and Oaklands/Woodlawn cemeteries, two historic African-American graveyards reserved during the segregation era for the predominantly black residents of Newtown.
But he is the first to take the issue to a courtroom, where he formally accuses Chandler’s Funeral Chapel of inflicting emotional distress and interfering with a corpse.
According to Dover’s lawsuit, his mother, Mary Lane, was buried in 1988 an unmarked tomb like many others in Galilee Cemetery. He is sure of the spot, because it was between the graves of Lane’s husband and another relative.
That spot now holds a vault for Walter Petty, who was buried in November 2008, the lawsuit states. State law prohibits burying people on top of each other unless specifically requested, attorneys familiar with burial law say.
Clyde Chandler, the funeral director Dover is suing, said he had no comment at this time because of the pending litigation.
The man in charge of Annette Vaults in Tampa, which does most of the grave-digging in those cemeteries, says Dover is more than likely mistaken about where his mother was buried.
“There’s just no way in the world you could do that without knowing someone was there,” Percy Collins said.
That is, unless she was buried deeper than the two feet he would dig for a vault, he said.
Members of a task force overseeing the cemeteries have long accused Chandler’s Funeral Chapel and Jones Funeral Home of Sarasota of refusing to cooperate on several fronts, including over the $200 burial fees families pay toward the maintenance and upkeep of the cemeteries.
Other people, including Sarasota County Commissioner Carolyn Mason, have said their relatives’ unmarked graves have probably had strangers entombed on top of them.
The Woodlawn/Galilee Cemetery Restoration Task Force voted to suspend all burials at both sites in January because there are no complete records on who is buried where.
And New College anthropology professor Uzi Baram began mapping and cataloging the smaller Galilee cemetery in February in hopes of clearing up some of the confusion.
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