Wondering whether their loved ones were resting in peace or in a pile, friends and relatives peered through a fence as authorities dug into a seven-foot mound of dirt, bones and teeth.
The authorities were looking for uprooted remains dumped in a common plot so operators of a historic cemetery could resell the graves, sometimes over and over, said Raymond Giunta, executive officer of the state Cemetery Board."It was the awfullest thing I ever heard of, it really was," Sylvester Robinson of Los Angeles said Wednesday. "I have a mother and a brother out there. I never heard of anything like this."
It wasn't clear how many sets of remains were in the pile at Paradise Memorial Park, Giunta said. He said 200 discarded grave markers were found at the back of the 10-acre property.
"Some of the stones we found were 1947, '58; they removed the stone off the grave," Giunta said.
Paradise Memorial, established in 1927 about eight miles south of downtown Los Angeles, was the first black-owned cemetery in the West, according to the Santa Fe Springs Historical Society. It was bought in 1967 by the current owners, Alma Fraction, daughter Felicia Fraction and son Victor Fornter.
The three didn't return phone calls from authorities and were not at their homes Wednesday, Giunta said.
The owners apparently have been "double-selling" graves since 1986, telling customers they were getting a new plot, while the original occupant was dumped in the "spoils pile," the accumulation of excavated soil that builds up at every cemetery, Giunta said.
The situation was discovered during an audit last week by the cemetery board, which also turned up financial irregularities, Giunta said.
The cemetery board began keeping a closer eye on Paradise Memorial after a state lawmaker recently said a constituent had complained about poor upkeep, and after the cemetery was fined last year for failing to file a required report on its endowment trust fund.
Investigators found cards and records that apparently indicated, by lines drawn through names, whose remains had been moved. The records indicated one grave had been used as many as eight times.
But Giunta said it will be impossible to definitely identify the scattered bones.
The remains will be reburied this week in a mass grave.
Giunta said the cemetery, run by the state board, will not be reopened until after that.
"We're very upset," said Renee Island, who stopped at the fence with her cousin to look for their grandmother's grave.
"It's wrong that they're doing people's bodies like that," she said. "They're supposed to rest when they die, not get digged up."