Families visiting a Central Arkansas cemetery calling the conditions troubling. They say the landscaping isn’t being kept up at the Rest in Peace cemetery in Hensley.
They came with weed-wackers and rakes, just so they could see their loved ones.
‘It’s like a kick in the gut,” said Rhonda Williams.
Instead of visiting her parents Williams spent hours Monday just trying to find them. She says conditions at Rest in Peace Cemetery are anything but peaceful.
Overgrown grass and mud cover gravestones, while piles of dirt make it hard to walk the grounds.
“It doesn’t look good, it smells,” Williams added. “It shouldn’t be looking like that.”
After some digging, Williams finally found her parents, but not every visitor had the same luck.
Meghan Rivers couldn’t leave the flowers she brought at her grandparents resting place, since she couldn’t even find their headstone.
“You have a hope to do something and you’re not able,” Rivers said.
She says it’s not the first time she’s had problems locating her loved ones. Almost every visit Rivers has to dig out her dad’s gravestone from a layer of mud.
“Continually digging him up,” Rivers said. “It’s mentally taxing. You have to anticipate manual labor as well as visiting someone that’s deceased.”
Calls to Finality LLC, the company that manages the cemetery, keep going to voicemail.
Quentin Rhodes, who was cleaning off his parent’s graves, says he talked to a manager last month trying to get someone to clean up his family’s grave site.
“They said the cemetery was under bankruptcy,” Rhodes said.
Since he hasn’t heard back Rhodes did the cleanup himself.
“My mother and father, they wouldn’t appreciate their graves looking like this,” he said.
Williams says she called management about the conditions after Mother’s Days, but no one has called her back.
“You can’t put a price on family,” Williams added.
Fox 16 called management multiple times and stopped at the office Monday, but it was closed.
Anyone who’s having problems with conditions at a cemetery can file a complaint with the state Board of Cemeteries.
http://www.cemeteryboard.arkansas.gov/
