Runway Graves & Cemetery Prisons | 4M #183

Welcome to the hundred-and-eighty-third edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #183, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

Destructive dig

A convicted murderer is facing new charges after digging up and cruelly discarding the casket and corpse of a days-old infant in a West Virginia cemetery. The body and broken casket pieces were found by a couple who were in the cemetery decorating a grave for Easter. After a week of public speculation, authorities announced the arrest of the 47-year-old man who was released from prison in 2008 after serving 9 years for a murder charge. He claimed he was digging a grave for a new burial when he inadvertently disinterred the infant’s casket, which was buried in the 1980s. Instead of reporting the error and repairing the damage, he threw the casket down a hillside, displacing the baby’s body in the process. He is being held on a $105,000 bail until his April 10 hearing.

Domain debacle

Should government entities be allowed to acquire land from private cemeteries for public projects via eminent domain? A community in Pennsylvania has given their local officials their answer, and it’s a big NO. Although laws exist to exclude occupied cemetery land from acquisition through eminent domain, a loophole could allow the county to acquire unused land in a local cemetery to build a new prison. A state representative has stepped into the debate, and has vowed to introduce legislation titled the “Hallowed Ground Bill,” which will block cemeteries from the eminent domain option.

Taxiway tombstones

Anyone wishing to pay their respects to Richard and Catherine Dotson might have to dodge a few airplanes along the way. You see, the Dotsons, along with two of their relatives, are buried beneath the runway of Savannah-Hilton Head International Airport in Georgia. It seems that in 1942, the federal government acquired land in which more than 100 people were buried, including the Dotsons, to construct the airport. The Dotsons’ great-grandchildren negotiated to relocate all but these four graves to another location, but chose to keep their ancestors’ resting places undisturbed. According to the airport’s website, these are the only four graves known to exist under any active airport runway.

Weekend Update worthy

If you caught this weekend’s Saturday Night Live show, you probably heard Weekend Update hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che share the headline that a UK toddler had eaten a portion of its grandfather’s cremated remains. The mom shared a video of the aftermath, showing ashes spread across a counter, the sofa, and the little boy’s shirt and mouth. On SNL, Che read the headline, following up with the cheesy punchline, “Well, at least they can say he got his grandfather’s eyes.” Eww.