Cemetery Worker Sentenced to 3 Years
A groundskeeper who pleaded no contest to charges that he ordered workers at a Santa Fe Springs cemetery to dig up nearly two dozen graves so that the plots could be resold was sentenced Tuesday to three years in state prison.
Victor Fortner, 50, was also ordered to pay at least $28,000 to families whose loved ones were disinterred between 1993 and 1995.
A grand jury indicted Fortner after sheriff’s deputies found unburied human bone fragments while investigating what appeared to be cemetery neglect in 1995.
Tuesday’s sentencing in Superior Court comes less than a month after Alma Fraction, Fortner’s 70-year-old mother and the owner of Paradise Memorial Park cemetery, was sentenced to a year in County Jail for her role in the cemetery scandal.
Fraction’s daughter Felicia, 32, was sentenced to six months for mishandling cemetery funds.
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