Families upset after Highland Cemetery removes items from graves for cleanup
SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Several South Bend families reached out to ABC57 Tuesday and Wednesday to share they were upset with Highland Cemetery after learning workers removed some personal items from their loved one’s graves, many said without enough notice.
NightTeam’s Blake Parker met with some of those emotional families on Wed. as they filled the Highland Cemetery throughout the day, looking for those items and some answers.
One of those families included Shalonda Witherspoon, whose son is laid to rest at the cemetery. She explained she didn’t know about the cleanup until it was happening, hearing about it from another community member’s social media post.
“… a young lady was telling everybody, she went live, and she was telling everybody to come down to the cemetery and get their loved ones things because they had pulled everything and just threw everything up against the fence… we should have gotten an email two weeks ago if they were gonna be doing this and we did not, period,” said Witherspoon.
By the time Witherspoon made it to the cemetery, her son’s grave was bare. After digging through the scattered statues, grave markers, and other jumbled mementos, she was only able to recover a handful of small things at the back fence and said the rest of her son’s items were thrown out.
“I went to my son’s grave… everything was gone off of it… Am I upset? Highly upset, highly mad, because this ain’t the first time that I’ve been here that I’ve had to dig stuff out of the trash. This time, I can’t dig anything out of the trash because there is nothing, because they threw it all away, for what?” expressed Witherspoon.
The company that owns and operates Highland Cemetery, Everstory Partners, explained they have yearly routine cleaning days with the rules of what is and is not allowed as decoration posted around the cemetery. They did explain, however, they aim to give better notice to families in the future.
Everstory Partners full statement:
“Highland Cemetery strives to provide a place of peaceful contemplation for all visiting families and loved ones. We also must be mindful of the heavy, earth-moving equipment that our team operates in order to service graves and other interment spaces. Breakable and other prohibited items, such as the ones removed over the past few days, pose risks for our team members and our equipment and also make landscaping the grounds and leaf removal very difficult.
For these reasons, we conduct periodic park cleanups to ensure that prohibited items are not left on site. During these cleanups, we dispose of older floral arrangements and remove breakable items. Over the last few days, we have removed - but have not disposed of - such breakable items and have preserved them away from the memorial grounds.
Our cleanup was announced on social media in late September and is referenced in on-site signage around our grounds. Nonetheless, we are sensitive to the concerns of the community members who may have been impacted by this cleanup. Please know that we will provide better notice in the future so you are informed in advance of these park cleanups.
In order to help make this right for our community, we have paused our ongoing clean up efforts to allow family members the opportunity to collect items they would like to keep, rather than placing them in the holding area. If you would like to speak further about our rules and regulations which go into detail regarding permissible and non-permissible items, you can reach us at 574.367.7404. These rules also can be found on our website.”
Click here to view the rules and regulations