Friday, April 20, 2012

Catholics call on Illinois to take over cemetery

Some Catholic leaders in Chicago are calling on state officials to take over a suburban cemetery where police investigators discovered 11 unburied bodies.

The Evangelical Catholic Diocese of the Northwest issued a statement Sunday blasting Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery.

Bishop James Alan Wilkowski says the cemetery has shown great disregard.

The bodies were inside caskets found stacked in a storage room behind a chapel at the cemetery in Thornton.

Cook County Sheriff's Department officials say investigators were tipped off by a person who had tried visiting a loved one they were told had been buried only to discover the body was in storage.

The manager told investigators the bodies weren't buried because a backhoe driver was recently fired.

A message left at the cemetery today wasn't immediately returned.