BRIDGEPORT — Just weeks after the families of those buried in the city’s Park Cemetery began restoring the historic graveyard, they are facing a new challenge — this time from the city’s probate judge.
Judge Paul Ganim this week appointed a three-person board to oversee the 140-year-old Lindley Street cemetery, and that’s not sitting well with the families.
“This is an end run around the families, and it is shocking, unethical and illegal,” said Cheryl Jansen, of Shelton, who has four generations of her family buried in the cemetery.
Jansen led the fight to oust the former longtime manager of the cemetery, Dale LaPrade, who the families accused of digging up old graves to reuse them for new burials.
During a civil court trial, police detectives testified that dozens of headstones, some dating to the 1800s, had been moved at Park Cemetery so the newly dead could be buried in plots stacked on old graves.
In December, LaPrade was arrested and charged with interference with a cemetery. She is next scheduled to be in court on June 26. In the meantime, a Superior Court judge granted Jansen’s lawsuit to remove LaPrade as manager of the cemetery and put Jansen and other family of those buried in the cemetery in charge.
Since that time, Jansen said, they set up a new board of herself and two other people and spent many hours cleaning up the cemetery which, according to court records, had been left in physical and financial disarray by LaPrade. Jansen said she and...
from News https://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Families-have-grave-concerns-about-Bridgeport-13904355.php
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