Three gravediggers and a cemetery manager at the historic, black Burr Oak cemetery south of Chicago, are accused of unearthing hundreds of corpses, dumping some in a weeded area and double-stacking others in existing graves, in an elaborate scheme to resell the plots.
The suspects, all of whom are also black, were identified as Carolyn Towns, 49, Keith Nicks, 45, and Terrence Nicks, 39 — all of Chicago — and Maurice Dailey, 61, of Robbins. They each have been charged with one felony count of dismembering a human body.
Bond was set at $250,000 for Towns, the cemetery's manager, and at $200,000 for the other three.
Frantic relatives of the deceased descended on Burr Oak -- the final resting place of lynching victim Emmett Till and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington — in hopes someone could tell them their loved ones' remains were not among the pile of bones that littered a remote area of the property in Alsip, 12 miles south of Chicago.
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It wasn't until early Friday morning that Simeon Wright, a cousin of civil rights icon Emmett Till, learned his relative's former casket had been tossed aside, neglected and rusted in a back storage room at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip.
This morning, Wright went to see the casket and found it tucked away in a side shed.
The first thing he told Sheriff Tom Dart, who accompanied him, is he wants it moved.
"The lawyer for the [Emmett Till] foundation is going to kick up a stink about this too," he said. "We want it moved.
"Hopefully we'll find someone to do what they were supposed to: preserve it.
"They just parked it and left it," he said. "Hopefully we can clean it up and save it."
Earlier, on learning of the dilapidated condition of the casket, Wright said, "I'm disgusted. This is the lowest you can go. It shows how far greed will take you."
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