Owner promises to fix water problems at cemetery

When Freda Yeary visited her husband’s grave in a Clay Twp. cemetery last week, she found it totally submerged in water.

“Almost every marker was underwater,” Yeary said. “I had my shoes full of water before I left.”

Yeary’s complaint isn’t the first Royal Oak Memorial Gardens Cemetery on National Road has received. In May, Frank Milles, vice president of StoneMor Partners L.P. in Levittown, Pa. and the owner of the cemetery, was given thirty days to respond to a complaint filed with Ohio Department of Commerce’s Division of Real Estate & Professional Licensing.

Milles said his response, filed on June 8, made a promise to rectify the drainage issues by the end of the year. “We had a civil engineer come out to shoot the elevations, to look over the property and come up with a suggested approach to clearing up this problem,” he said Thursday.

The company previously installed a drainage catch basin, but Milles admitted it “hasn’t been very effective and hasn’t completely cleared it up.” When this news organization visited the cemetery on Thursday, many of the graves in the “Garden of Devotion” area along Wellbaum Rd. were underwater.

“I do not feel that anyone in this area — in this section of the cemetery — is being respected,” said Yeary, who added that she has been unable to contact Milles. “I’ve left numerous messages but not have my phone calls have been returned.”

Many of Yeary’s family members are buried in Royal Oak; someday, she says, she will be buried there too. On Mother’s Day, she visited her mother-in-law’s grave with her husband, Kennith.

“He said, ‘Tomorrow, I want you to call Royal Oak and ask them to fix this cemetery,” Yeary recalls. Her husband died unexpectedly the following day. Now, she says, she is determined to fulfill his “last wish.”

“There is no respect for his grave at all,” she said. “I want to feel peace when I come here — not get more upset.”

The Cemetery Dispute Resolution Commission will hear the complaint filed against StonneMor Partners L.P. on Thursday, July 16, according to Lindsey Burnworth, public information officer with the Ohio Department of Commerce.

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