Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart released a video Tuesday that showed the conditions of the Burr Oak Cemetery shortly after news broke about the plot reselling scandal.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart released a video Tuesday that showed the conditions of the Burr Oak Cemetery shortly after news broke about the plot reselling scandal.
In the 10-minute video, it showed plots that were freshly dug up, empty holes, headstones covered by grass that had not been cut in months and some bone fragments.
“This was the condition of the cemetery when we first arrived,” Dart said at a Tuesday news conference with Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office.
And despite all the manpower and special equipment being used for the investigation “ultimately it may be impossible to match a bunch of bone fragments with an actual person,” Grant said. “We recovered 200 pieces of bone fragments, and each bone piece could belong to a separate person making it difficult to identify anyone.”
For now the Burr Oak Cemetery, 4400 W. 127th St., in south suburban Alsip, will remain closed at least until Aug. 1, said Dart.
“Our search warrant is good for another two weeks,” Dart explained. “And it makes no sense to open up the cemetery and torture people further knowing that many of them will not be able to locate their loved ones’ headstones.”
In the meantime, Dart is working on updating the sheriff’s Web site so families will be able to go there to locate headstones.
On July 15, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Stuart Palmer appointed Roman Szabelsk to be the receiver for Burr Oak and manage the day-to-day duties, a task Dart’s office had been doing.
Szabelsk, who will be the receiver until the cemetery is sold, did not return phone calls seeking comment by press time.
The cemetery is owned by Perpetua Holdings of Illinois.
Trudi Foushee, a management consultant for Perpetua, disputes Dart’s previous claims that the cemetery’s record keeping was sloppy and hindered the investigation.
“I have been onsite from the very beginning. Perpetua never asked the Cook County Sheriff’s office to assume daily duties. That was something they chose to do,” she told the Defender. “The file cabinet he displayed last week at a news conference was one we had not used in years. Most of our records are computerized.”
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