In 2018, a Houston mother buried her young daughter at the cemetery, a perpetual-care cemetery on North Main Street. For years afterward she came to visit her daughter’s grave, the way a parent does, a fixed, sacred place she could return to.
In August 2024, that place was gone. When she arrived to visit, she found her daughter’s grave disturbed. The burial marker that had identified her child was nowhere to be found, and where her daughter had been laid to rest, a fresh grave had been opened and covered back over with new dirt.
No one from the cemetery had called her. No one had warned her, asked her, or explained. She discovered it the way no parent ever should, standing over the disturbed grave of her own child, with no marker and no answers.
We are pursuing claims against the cemetery on behalf of the mother. A perpetual-care cemetery exists to do one thing above all: keep each grave undisturbed and properly marked, and keep accurate records of who is buried where. As pleaded, the cemetery failed at every part of that, it allowed the daughter’s grave to be disturbed, lost or removed her marker, opened a fresh grave in her place, and never notified the family of any of it.
A family that buries a child trusts the cemetery to leave that grave exactly as it was, forever. Disturbing it, removing the marker, and saying nothing is a profound breach of that trust, and it leaves a grieving mother unable even to be sure her daughter still rests where she laid her.
We brought claims for negligence and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including the failure to maintain the grave, the failure to keep proper records, the failure to notify the mother that her daughter’s grave had been disturbed, and the failure to train and supervise the people responsible for the burials and the records. We are demanding that the cemetery account, on the record, for what happened to this child’s grave.
A mother should never have to stand over her daughter’s empty, unmarked grave and wonder where her child is. We stepped in to make the cemetery answer that question, and answer for how it was allowed to happen.
We brought claims for negligence and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including the failure to maintain the grave, the failure to keep proper records, the failure to notify the mother that her daughter’s grave had been disturbed, and the failure to train and supervise the people responsible for the burials and the records. We are demanding that the cemetery account, on the record, for what happened to this child’s grave.
A mother should never have to stand over her daughter’s empty, unmarked grave and wonder where her child is. We stepped in to make the cemetery answer that question, and answer for how it was allowed to happen.
