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DNA tests show the bones belong to a retired Air Force colonel, whose relatives are part of a lawsuit accusing two cemeteries of grave desecration.
©Associated Press
October 15, 2002
FORT LAUDERDALE -- Human bones found amid debris in a cemetery maintenance yard belonged to a retired Air Force colonel buried in a standard grave in 1983, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported Monday.
DNA test results on the bones were revealed in court Monday at a hearing on a class action lawsuit accusing two Jewish cemeteries owned by Service Corporation International of grave desecration.
Relatives of the military veteran, Hymen Cohen, and other people buried at Menorah Gardens cemeteries in Palm Beach and Broward counties filed the lawsuit last December.
The state checked four locations in a half-acre maintenance area at the Palm Beach cemetery for human remains in April and is still running DNA tests on other recovered bones.
Attorneys for relatives believe bones from at least four people were in piles of earth used by gravediggers for fill.
Cohen's bones matched DNA taken from his sister, said his son Sheldon Cohen, a dentist in Eastlake, Ohio.
"Obviously, my sister and I are both pretty angry about the whole thing," Sheldon Cohen said after the DNA results were announced in court. "It's all about money, at least on their part."
Gravediggers have testified that the body of Hymen Cohen, buried next to that of his wife, was dug up with a backhoe to make room for another man's wife.
All four people may have to be buried again because of a religious prohibition against reusing a grave site, said family attorney Neal Hirschfeld.
Jim Born, an FDLE supervisor, refused to estimate the number of people whose bones were found in the maintenance area.
"We're not talking about a mass grave. We're not talking about hundreds of people," he said.
FDLE attorney Jackie Boswell told Circuit Judge Leonard Fleet that a criminal fraud investigation targeting the cemeteries hasn't yet gone to a grand jury.
Sheldon Cohen thinks SCI executives should be put in jail.
"The gravediggers are guys that were told what to do," he said by telephone from his office. "Somebody at the top knew what was going on."
Outside court, SCI attorney Dennis O'Hara said, "I don't think we heard anything in there that surprised anybody."
SCI officials had speculated earlier that the bones belonged to animals. The FDLE announced afterward that preliminary tests indicated the bones were human.
SCI has denied any knowledge of intentional grave desecration. But 1,400 families involved in the lawsuit accuse SCI of mismarking graves, separating couples who paid to be buried together and squeezing new graves between old, crowded ones.
Houston-based SCI, the world's largest cemetery operator, is to offer testimony next month against a request to let relatives band together in a single civil lawsuit seeking unspecified damages.