Baton Rouge, LA: Mother: I couldn’t put flowers on his grave, someone’s buried on top of him

BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) –

Each blade of grass cut at Gilbert Cemetery is a small step toward closing a painful chapter in the cemetery’s history.

“They don’t even have a record that my child was buried here,” said Nikeria Payne.

Last October The Attorney General’s Office filed suit against the former caretaker Lymus Washington, who has yet to come forward.  They say he illegally and irresponsibly buried people here, losing track of where graves were and in some cases burying one corpse on top of another.

One of those lost graves is the infant son of Payne. She says her son was buried in 2004, but that a year later his headstone was gone, replaced by a marker of another grave.

“My son’s birthday just passed. I couldn’t even come and put flowers on his grave, because somebody else is on top of him,” said Payne.

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