Ending legal action by relatives whose family graves had been mishandled by a Santa Fe Springs cemetery, a court commissioner approved a $3.9-million settlement Thursday with about 40 mortuaries in the Los Angeles area.
"The court made the right decision. I don't think anything can be done to improve the settlement amount received," said Mike Arias, one of the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs.
But some of the families involved said they felt little sense of closure.
"The amount of money they're offering us is not enough to compensate all these people who are hurting," said Joyce Esquivel, a Rialto minister who has been storing the headstone from her son's grave in her car trunk since discovering that his body was missing from his burial site at Paradise Memorial Park.
Audrey Hughley, who has eight relatives buried at Paradise, burst into tears after the ruling was announced Thursday. "For years I didn't cry, and now I can't stop," she said. "They don't just slap our face. They spit on our graves. We can only pray that somebody up there will hear our cries."
Last year, Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Bruce Mitchell approved a $4.5-million settlement with Paradise. His latest ruling brings the total settlement to about $8.4 million, all of which is being paid by insurance companies. Lawyers will receive about one-third, and $2 million will go to a trust fund to maintain the cemetery, the attorneys said. The remainder minus other costs will be divided among claimants who could number in the thousands.
Paradise, a cemetery that served a predominantly African American clientele, had been suspected of misdeeds by people who buried relatives there but couldn't find their graves, or found tombstones had been moved.
In 1995, state investigators discovered that Paradise employees routinely dug up caskets to resell sites and sometimes piled bodies in a single grave. Investigators also found a 7-foot-high pile of dirt containing human bones.
Paradise's owner, Alma Fraction, and her daughter Felicia were sentenced to County Jail in 1997 for scheming to dig up bodies and resell graves. Alma Fraction was sentenced to one year and her daughter to 180 days. Fraction's son, Victor Fortner, a groundskeeper, was sentenced to three years in state prison for disinterring human remains. Altogether, an estimated 3,000 out of 26,000 burials at Paradise were questionable, Arias said.
