Olivehurst Woman Says Grandmother's Ashes Soaked After Cemetery's Disrespect
OLIVEHURST (CBS13) — An Olivehurst woman says her grandmother's grave was neglected and disrespected by the cemetery that was supposed to care for hit.
Now Tonya Calandrion is worried she will have to pay to put her loved one's remains back where they belong.
Her grandmother's ashes were resting at Sierra View Memorial Park, but she noticed something was very wrong when she came to visit a couple of days ago.
"Basically, the ashes were a bag of mud," she said. "They were neglected, they weren't taken care of."
She says the top of her grandmother's cremorial was open and filled with water, soaking her grandmother's ashes.
"I didn't feel that they should be sitting out here like that," she said.
So Calandrion took the ashes home after she tried calling the after-hours number for more than an hour. She brought the ashes back to the cemetery to complain a couple of days later.
That's when management told her she would have to pay to have them returned to the cremorial—something Calandrion just doesn't understand.
"I feel my family isn't responsible for it at all," she said. "It's their negligence; the family had nothing to do with it."
When we stopped by the site, we saw the plate was back to normal. We then tried to get answers from a manager on site about the condition of the plot, if the ashes had been returned, and if the family would have to pay.
A manager told us to call the corporate number, but nobody was available.
Calandrion says she hopes the cemetery will do the right thing.
"I hope that they would fix this," she said. "I would like to see her laid to rest peacefully the way she should have been to begin with."
Removing ashes from a cemetery is illegal, but Tonya says she isn't facing any charges. She says what she did was what any family member would have done in her situation.
The state cemetery and funeral bureau says if you have any complaints about the condition of a grave, first take it up with the cemetery, then file a complaint with the state if that doesn't work.
