Southern California families said they couldn’t find their loved ones’ graves at the nation’s largest cemetery located in Whittier. The I-Team’s Joel Grover found the answer for the NBC4 News at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024.
When Jo Skibby went to Rose Hills Memorial Park this spring to visit her uncle's grave, she couldn't find it or hundreds of other graves she knew were in the same area.
"This is just utterly disgusting," the retired schoolteacher said about the nation's largest cemetery, which is in Whittier.
Across the street in the Muslim section of Rose Hills, Dr. Yasamin Farhad also couldn't find the graves of her grandparents, Asefa and Sakhi Farhad, until workers showed up at her insistence with shovels and started digging up dirt and grass.
“These people had lives that deserved to be honored,” Farhad told the I-Team.
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Both Farhad and Skibby asked the I-Team to accompany them to Rose Hills and investigate.
Using metal probes and shovels, the I-Team found graves in row after row that were completely covered by up by inches of dirt and overgrown grass.
"We're finding hundreds, probably thousands of graves that have vanished," remarked Jo Skibby.
What the I-Team found at Rose Hills appears to violate California's cemetery maintenance standards, including that “grass shall be trimmed or mowed to a level where… individual graves can be seen.”
The I-Team has been investigating problems at cemeteries since 2019 when it found a similar problem at Pierce Brothers Valhalla Cemetery in North Hollywood. Row after row, graves were invisible because they were covered by layers of dirt and grass.
Both Pierce Brothers and Rose Hills are owned by the country's largest operator of cemeteries, Service Corporation International or SCI.
The I-Team asked SCI to answer questions about the vanishing graves at Rose Hills, but the corporation declined.
"We are going to pass on the interview,” SCI said in an email to the I-Team, adding that it's "diligently working to remedy the overgrowth problem in specific areas of the park.”
But Jo Skibby wanted answers from Rose Hills and its owner SCI.
After she had workers uncover her uncle Winfield Snelson's grave, the I-Team found vanishing graves on both sides of his plot.
On two occasions, Skibby said she spoke with Rose Hills maintenance workers, including a supervisor, who told her they had only a minimal staff to maintain and uncover graves when they get buried by dirt and grass.
"The workers told me … that they have insufficient people to do the job that they're being asked to do," Skibby said.
After the I-Team exposed buried headstones in 2019 at Pierce Brothers in Burbank, Ken Howard filed a complaint with the California Cemetery and Funeral Bureau after finding graves around his aunt's plot covered up. The state cited and fined Pierce Brothers $1,500, saying it "failed … to refill or reset sunken graves."
This month the I-Team went back to Pierce Brothers and found all the graves were now visible and apparently well kept.
Now Yasamin Farhad and Jo Skibby are filing complaints with the state over problems at Rose Hills, hoping the state and the cemetery will take action to uncover all the vanishing graves.
“I’m going to follow this to the end," Skibby said. "I will ensure whatever I can possibly do to make this right. I’m committed to doing."
