Family horrified by protruding foot as they bury grandfather
A mourning family was horrified when they buried their grandfather and saw a decaying foot from the grave right next to their lost loved one.
A mourning family was horrified when they buried their grandfather and saw a decaying foot from the grave right next to their lost loved one.
Cleveland Butler, 85, died after a stroke at a nursing home, but when he was buried at Mount Holiness Memorial Park, his friends and family were shocked when they saw the foot on top of Butler’s blue casket.
“This was a very traumatizing situation, first dealing with losing my father and then this,” daughter Sandra Butler told the New York Daily News. “I couldn’t even look at it. It was too much and no one said anything to us. It was like business as usual for them. They just dumped the dirt in the plot like it was normal, like it’s nothing to them.”
Sandra’s brother, Alonzo, also complained that the cemetery workers simply ignored the situation and started to quickly pour dirt into the grave.
“They heard it was a leg on the casket and they didn’t even try to investigate it,” Alonzo said.
However, Mount Holiness owner James Shmergel said that the whole scene was not that out of the ordinary.
“Is it newsworthy? In a cemetery?” asked Shmergel. “Not really.”
Cemetery caretaker Bill Plog added that he was surprised this was not more common. “There was a casket,” he said. “It deteriorated. You can purchase a concrete vault, but people don’t. That grave there is from 1969 . . . It’s unfortunate that this happened, but this is a graveyard.”
He added that the workers trying to fill the grave were just trying to keep the family from being exposed to the scene longer than necessary. “People are grieving,” he explained. “The last thing you want to do is get into an argument with people. Honestly, I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.”
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