Just when you think that human beings can sink no further when it comes to what they’ll do to make a buck a story like this slinks out:
Authorities today sharply increased the estimate of the number of bodies disinterred at Burr Oak Cemetery in southwest suburban Alsip in a scheme to illegally resell grave sites.
Two hundred to 300 bodies were dug up and dumped into an isolated, weedy area of the cemetery, where many prominent African-Americans are buried, including Emmett Till.
Former cemetery manager Carolyn Towns, 49, foreman Keith Nicks, 45, and dump-truck operator Terrence Nicks, 39, all of Chicago, and back-hoe operator Maurice Dailey, 59, of Robbins, were each charged with one count of dismembering a human body, a Class X felony. They all face up to 30 years in prison.
The group was also apparently running a fraudulent Emmett Till memorial fund.
In Illinois a “Class X felony”, the most serious class, carries a sentence of from 6 to 30 years. Parole may be in as little as a year and half.
Quite a number of notables are buried in Burr Oak Cemetery including musicians Willie Dixon, Dinah Washington, and Otis Spann, and Negro Leagues Baseball players Jimmie Crutchfield and John Donaldson.
There’s a little more explanation of what was going on:
The charges against Towns allege that “numerous graves were excavated and the human remains were then buried in a rear vacant lot in Burr Oak cemetery, Alsip … She then sold the vacant grave sites for her own personal financial gain.” Authorities said she earlier had been fired by the cemetery’s owners because of theft allegations.
Bodies and parts of bodies were found lying on top of the ground, there was double-burying and who knows what all else.
Words fail me.
In 2001, the average sentence for a Class X felony was 11 years. The criminal complaint seems light to me, it would seem like these allegations are of multiple crimes, that could easily amount to at least the equivalent of life in jail. OTOH, these are non-violent crimes and it may not be worth the effort from the prosecution’s standpoint to try to convince a judge that the appropriate sentencing range resembles a multiple homicide case.
You know, I never thought that anyone could top what the church where my wife was pastor did some thirty years before her time there.
It seems that the new riding lawn mower would not fit between the earliest tombstones in the cemetery. There was also a shortage of parking. Solution? Tear down all the old tombstones (up to the row “where there are still living members who remember any of those buried there”) and pave over all the graves from 1861 to the mid 1890s to make a parking lot! Old tomb stones were turned into walkways and steps for some of the homes of the members, and those not recycled that way were dumped into a couple of run-off ponds on the neighboring farms. Strangely enough, no one ever raised the issue of whether or not such actions were acceptable — until I called the state agency in charge of regulating and protecting cemeteries the week after my wife resigned as pastor.
Actually Emitt Tills grave was not involved! His original casket was found in a storage shed in very bad shape! It was supposed to go to a memorial that the 4had started. When till’s body was exhumed a couple years back he was reburied in the original site in a new casket.
i would like to say that i am a dauhter of a man , person ,human being that was buried there. my father along with other family members grandmother, grandfather, aunts uncles and cousins was buried there, this cemetary was considered a family cemetary. i am so mad more than hurt to know that my father can’t be founded. this is a place where bodies are susspose to be at peace. i also think that these people should be punished to the full extent of the law they shouldn’t be in a federal prison they should be with all the other criminals in population. even though these were bodies with no more life, what type of person or human being would be so evil to do a thing like that.
I see that whitey did not do this deed.