|
By Donald H. Harrison
 SAN DIEGO -- Lisa Marshall, spokeswoman for Service Corporation International, the Houston-based company that operates 1,500 cemeteries, funeral homes and crematoria around the country, called to answer my questions and reassure me.
One of those cemeteries is Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California, where the management has been accused in a class action suit of surreptitiously moving caskets and sometimes mangling the bodies within them in an alleged attempt to create and sell more plots at the cemetery.
Up to our call, Marshall had been reluctant to talk to the media, saying in official news releases that her company did not want to try the case in the press. I wrote a column on September 17 about how nightmarish it is, in the face of the allegations, to be the son of two people buried in that cemetery in the northern San Fernando Valley, and the step-son of another, and yet how I, as a journalist, feel an obligation not to jump to any conclusions.
Marshall called me after that column appeared, thanking me for staying objective. If Service Corporation International had at first been media adverse, she said, it was because CNN was
told about the suit even before authorities at Eden Memorial Park were told about it. Camera crews were en route to the cemetery even before cemetery officials had an opportunity
to get their bearings and try to understand the full magnitude of the allegations.
In her capacity as managing director for corporate communications of Service Corporation International, Marshall made several points in our telephone interview.
First, that Service Corporation International is in the process of investigating the allegations with a team of officials drawn from other facilities of SCI. None of them have any personal stake in the outcome of the investigation, and all of them know cemetery procedures and operations well, Marshall said. She
Go to the top of right column
|
|
said the investigators will be “judicious and unbiased” in
their efforts to learn the facts.
“We are trying to get to the bottom of this, it is a surprise to us,” Marshall said. “It is not what we stand for, not what we are all about. We spend a lot of time and effort on the best
training in the industry, and we reinforce this with policies and procedures that are outstanding. So, for us, these allegations are difficult to believe.”
The investigators are talking to employees at the cemetery, to understand “how they conduct their business and what they do,” Marshall said.
She rejected outright the premise that caskets were moved on the corporation’s instructions in an effort to increase burial space and thereby make more profits.
“Eden Memorial Park has 72 total acres, 26 of which are undeveloped,” she said. Not all the plots within the 46 developed acres have been sold, she said. So, she asserted,
there is no financial incentive to secretly push around coffins.
Approximately 40,000 people are interred within the 46 acres, with more plots to be sold, suggesting that Eden Memorial Park easily has room for another 20,000 burials, if not more.
As the internal investigation proceeds and as the corporation’s attorneys work on an answer to the class action suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by attorney Michael Avenatti, she said, she wants families like mine—whose loved ones
are buried there—to know that if they have any question at all about the status of their family graves, they can “come out to the park, and let’s look.”
She said one technique for determining if a coffin is where it should be is probing the ground with a pole—as attorney Avenatti previously described. “If for some reason, people have a question after that, imaging also is possible.” And if there remains a question still, “another option is always disinterment,” she said.
“Certainly,” Marshall added, “we will work with the families in whatever capacity is necessary.”
|
|
