As a hospice nurse, Patricia Tyson counsels people on the brink of death. But after work she’s become something of a private eye as she tries to get someone to fix up the Restvale Cemetery. “What’s going on at that cemetery is a disgrace,” she says. “I shouldn’t even call it a cemetery. It’s more like a landfill.”
But she looked closer when she visited her father’s grave a few weeks later. “I noticed this chain-link fence not far behind my father’s grave,” she says. “Behind that fence was a big mound of dirt, about six feet high. There were boards laid across the ground. The gravestones had this tumbledown look, as if they were off base.”
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She and her mother went to the office in the middle of the cemetery. “We complained about the setting to a staff member,” she says. “We even questioned if that’s where he was buried. I mean, it was almost as though they had moved him or something. I don’t remember seeing the fence at his funeral. I know if we had seen it we would have complained right away. Maybe it was concealed by the canopy, or maybe we were just so distracted. Whatever, the staffer told us not to worry–the fence was going to be fixed.”
On March 18 she went to the cemetery with her mother. “It was really bad,” she says. “The fence had broken down because of the weight of all the dirt that was behind it. We had brought some disposable cameras. I took six rolls of film.”
According to Tyson, in early April, shortly after she talked to Schwingen, Carter called her mother. “He offered her free flowers for the ones his employees dug up,” she says. “My mother said she didn’t want free flowers. This isn’t about free flowers. This is about keeping the cemetery clean. He said he wasn’t aware of the cemetery being in bad shape. It’s amazing what he’s not aware of at his own cemetery.”
He watched as she walked to look at some of the other graves. “Need some help finding your loved ones?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon,” she replied. “You don’t know that.”
