Police, Board Investigating Irregularities at Cemetery : Wilmington: Improper burials at historic graveyard spur inquiry into activities of former caretaker.

A hard, cold wind blew across the old Wilmington Cemetery early this week as Pete and Jeannie Vigil watched a backhoe unearth the tiny casket from the vault where their stillborn son, Angel, was buried two years ago.

The casket was supposed to have been laid next to the plot where Pete’s mother is buried. It wasn’t. And the casket of Pete’s mother, who died four months before Angel, was supposed to be buried in a cement vault at least three feet below the ground. That didn’t happen either.

Instead, both of the caskets and perhaps dozens more at the eight-acre cemetery--one of Los Angeles’ oldest--were apparently buried ragtag in plots that either already held caskets or were so shallow that even a small flowerpot couldn’t be planted near a headstone.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” a tearful Jeannie Vigil said as the earthmover and gravediggers set out to properly bury the caskets of her son and mother-in-law. “I don’t understand how anyone could have done this.”

Neither do authorities.

In a case that has shaken the normally stoic residents of this tough waterfront town, Los Angeles police, the city attorney’s office and the Wilmington cemetery board are investigating how and why as many as 145 caskets were improperly buried. The 135-year-old graveyard’s 10,000 or so dead include Civil War veterans and members of several famous early California families, including the Sepulvedas, Carsons and Bannings.

The inquiries thus far focus on the cemetery’s former caretaker, Joe Koosed, who was hired in 1989 and fired Oct. 9 from his $90,000-a-year job. Koosed, known to many in the community as a solid, hard-working caretaker, was fired, according to cemetery board Chairman Dade Albright, for poor performance and allegedly breaking several provisions of his contract--among them, a prohibition against living in the cemetery’s offices.

“We were aware some things weren’t being done right” in recent months, Albright said, without elaborating. But, he added, “all this on the burials came to light afterwards.”

All this, as Albright describes it, allegedly includes at least two instances of improper double burials on single-grave sites, two other older plots that were illegally resold by Koosed and more than two dozen instances of caskets being buried too shallow at the cemetery.

More improprieties could be discovered, Albright said, as cemetery workers continue the grim chore of unearthing caskets for reburial. That work, he said, began shortly after the new caretaker arrived three weeks ago and discovered the improper burials.

“We just have a grand mess that we are trying to straighten out,” Albright said.

As authorities try to unravel that “mess,” former caretaker Koosed said in an interview Wednesday that any improper burials at the cemetery were the result of years of sloppy management of the graveyard by its board of directors. “It’s a total administration problem,” he said.

“Most of the records were in poor shape (when) I got there,” Koosed said, adding that the cemetery grounds themselves often did not include the plot markers identifying grave sites. And with cemetery records and plot markers in a state of disarray, he maintained, it was almost inevitable that burial sites would be mistaken and caskets improperly buried.

“It was really (the cemetery board members’) error. The markings were not made,” Koosed said, maintaining that his complaints about the cemetery were ignored by its board members.

But Koosed’s claims were dismissed by Albright, who maintained that Koosed was responsible for managing the graveyard and that the number of improper burials cannot be blamed on poor records.

“If it was just one or two mistakes, you could say, ‘OK.’ But there were just too many of them that were just not buried” properly, Albright said.

The improper burials, authorities say, were first discovered in late October when the cemetery’s new caretaker attempted to plant an eight-inch flower holder over a grave. As he dug a hole for the pot, they say, the caretaker was startled to hit concrete only six inches below the ground.

The discovery led cemetery officials to search out other caskets recently buried at the cemetery. In doing so, they found one casket after another that either had not been buried where it should have been or was resting within inches of the ground, not the three feet prescribed by cemetery policy.

“I’ve never seen this before in my life,” said the new caretaker, who asked that only his first name--Jerome--be used for fear of retaliation by distraught relatives of those buried at the cemetery.

In an investigation just now getting under way, Detective Terry Kirkbride of the Los Angeles Police Department Harbor Division said authorities have yet to determine whether Koosed broke any laws while he was caretaker.

In one case, Kirkbride said, the recent unearthing of a casket shows that it was buried atop some bones. But given the age of the cemetery, Kirkbride said, it appeared the bones had been buried in a wooden casket that long ago disintegrated.

Similarly, Kirkbride said, the cemetery’s old and, in some cases, scattered records raise obvious problems in determining whether Koosed knowingly resold plots at the cemetery.

“We really don’t know whether they (plots) have been double sold,” Kirkbride said. “If they have, of course, we have a theft. But the records are so old” that additional research is needed before any conclusions can be made, he added.

While that investigation continues, scores of Wilmington residents have descended on the cemetery in recent days to check on the burial sites of loved ones. In many cases, they have gone about that grim task carrying long steel rods to puncture the earth, hoping to hit dirt, not concrete or caskets.

“I think it’s terrible what they’ve done,” Ralph Palumbo, 78, said Monday afternoon, using a rod to probe the grave sites of two brothers, a sister and his mother.

“He (Ralph Palumbo) always wanted to be buried here,” Francis Palumbo said, roaming the cemetery with her husband. “Now, I don’t know.”

At the other end of the cemetery, Jerome guided three workers in carefully unearthing and reburying another casket. That work, he said, had been going on from daybreak to long after dark for days.

Nearby, the Vigils stood watch over the grave site of their baby. And the new caretaker’s wife, Donna, looked on silently at their grief.

“This,” Donna said, “is what we’ve been dealing with since we got here.”