The cemetery has been under scrutiny since October 2005, when state investigators found that the remains of 4,000 people had not been properly buried or disposed. Since the cemetery’s troubles began, multiple lawsuits and a class-action lawsuit have been filed against the cemetery by family members of those buried at Grand View.
But on Sunday, family and friends had a chance to visit their loved ones’ graves, bringing flowers, urns, gardening tools to clean around headstones and American flags to display on the graves.
More families visited graves on Sunday than the previous opening on May 25, Baum said.
The cemetery should be open more often to families, said attorney Mary Der-Parseghian, who represents a group of families suing the cemetery.
“The cemetery just needs to open,” she said. “That’s what difficult for them.”
Glendale resident Joan Cameron carried a pitchfork as she and her daughter, Cassandra, searched for her great-grandfather’s grave.
She dug through dry grass and dirt, looking for her great-grandfather’s headstone.
Cameron uncovered other headstones in her other cemetery visits but couldn’t find her great-grandfather’s grave.
“We’re trying very hard to figure out where he is,” she said.
Several of the cemetery’s headstones are covered with dry grass and dirt.
Beverly Tognetti and her husband, Phil, trimmed away grass and wiped away dirt from her mother, father, grandmother and aunt’s graves at the cemetery on Sunday.
“It used to be beautiful,” she said of the cemetery.
The couple said they first began having problems at the cemetery in 1990, when Phil Tognetti noticed his mother-in-law’s coffin was only inches away from the grass surface.
