llinois Comptroller Dan Hynes moved Monday to freeze nearly $6 million in trust funds controlled by the Arizona company that owns Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip and to strip that firm from doing business at its other graveyard in Calumet Park.
The actions, coming on the eve of a major legislative assault Hynes will announce against the cemetery industry, represent a tightening of the legal screws against Perpetua Holdings of Illinois, which owns Burr Oak at 4400 W. 127th St. and Cedar Park Cemetery at 12540 S. Halsted.
Outside Burr Oak, onlookers and relatives of the dead continued flocking to the shuttered cemetery. They peered through a fence for glimpses inside the graveyard, despite pleas to stay away from law enforcement officials, who have turned the burial ground into a sprawling crime scene.
Authorities believe at least 300 bodies at Burr Oak were illegally dug up and discarded in a pile so their gravesites could be resold. Thousands of other dead buried at the cemetery, including babies, have not been accounted for by their survivors.
"Given the unconscionable discovery at Burr Oak, I don't want to take a chance that similar circumstances could be occurring under Perpetua's management at its other Illinois cemetery," Hynes said. "The fraud and betrayal of consumers by Burr Oak's employees warrant the revocation of all of Perpetua's licenses."
Hynes intends to revoke Perpetua's ability to accept funds for the care of its cemeteries and to conduct pre-need cemetery and funeral sales at both of its Illinois cemeteries. Ultimately, Hynes said, he wants both properties placed in a receivership.
Once Perpetua's $5.9 million in trust funds for cemetery maintenance and pre-purchased funerals are frozen, Hynes pledged to "make sure everybody gets what they're entitled to." A hearing is scheduled Friday.
Hynes' legislative package, which he will unveil today, would significantly strengthen state oversight of cemeteries throughout Illinois beyond the current requirement that cemeteries only submit financial documents to the state comptroller's office.
Hynes intends to call on lawmakers to give the state authority to oversee the maintenance and operations of cemeteries. That new power would rest with a state agency outside of his office, Hynes said.
"No one regulates, licenses or oversees the operations of a cemetery, how bodies are buried, what type of people are allowed to handle bodies," Hynes told the Chicago Sun-Times. "This would provide oversight over cemetery operations and maintenance, and that's what is sorely needed."
Cook County Board President Todd Stroger announced his own crackdown, imposing quarterly inspections on the 28 cemeteries in unincorporated parts of the county. However, that would not have uncovered the wrongs at Burr Oak, which is inside Alsip's boundaries.
Perpetua's CEO, Melvin Bryant, ignored a message left at his home, and a receptionist at his office referred calls to a Dallas publicist, who did not return a message.
In another piece of the mushrooming legal entanglement facing Perpetua, Chicago lawyer Shelby Kanarish is preparing a class-action lawsuit that's already netted some 60 plaintiffs. "Our allegation is, yeah, you have a manager there, but don't you have a duty to see what was going on out there?" Kanarish said.
About 30 law enforcement officials, including 20 FBI agents, combed over Burr Oak's 100,000-plus grave sites Monday, finding human remains that "were visible to the naked eye just walking through the area," FBI spokesman Ross Rice said.
There's little prospect of using DNA analysis to help identify those remains because there may be nothing to compare recovered evidence against, Rice said.
Near the cemetery, several of Burr Oak's neighbors now realize they may have missed signs of something being terribly amiss, including hearing late-night backhoes and observing the patterns of how people were buried.
"Every time there was a funeral, it always seemed to be in the same section," neighbor Tom Dabulskis told the Sun-Times.
Dabulskis and other neighbors also said they often heard backhoes and heavy equipment being operated at night.
