Posted: Feb 17, 2012 12:49 AM
Updated: Feb 17, 2012 7:25 AM
WESLACO - The city of Weslaco and an insurance company have agreed to pay a Rio Grande Valley family $240,000 for a burial mix-up. CHANNEL 5 NEWS has spent the past year asking questions about the case and other trouble at the city cemetery.
The family of Manuela Montez sued because cemetery workers refused to let Mrs. Montez be buried on top of her husband's grave when she died in 2007. She was buried miles away at another cemetery. This legal settlement will allow her to be buried where she always wanted, on top of her husband.
The case exposed decades of problems at the Weslaco City Cemetery. CHANNEL 5 NEWS wanted to know what the city has done to fix things, to locate missing records and solve the confusion.
Still today, if you ask city leaders exactly who is buried in the cemetery, they can't tell you.
Lupe Garcia inherited the mess. He's the Weslaco parks and recreation director. "We re-did pretty much everything. There was no tracking system to be honest with you. It was just all mixed up. We could not match a receipt with a burial," he said.
He told us many things have changed. "Now I think we have a lot better tracking system. So we can say, 'Where's this receipt or this purchaser' and everything matches," Garcia said.
He showed us the new forms workers are using. They are scanning receipts, records, and plots for burials dating back to the 1920s. They are putting that information into a new software system. Garcia says they have more tough work ahead. "That's going to be the longest part, having to go out there then physically sketch out a new map," he explained.
The city allowed CHANNEL 5 NEWS to see the drawing of the cemetery for the first time. It shows many areas where there are people buried, but the city doesn't have a record on who they are.
City Manager Leo Olivares refused to tell CHANNEL 5 NEWS about the status of an on-going criminal investigation. Olivares has already fired the cemetery foreman and a secretary. He said he's now focused on the future. "We have instituted checks and balances that were probably on the lax side in the past," he told us.
Garcia is concentrating on what he can change, hoping to make sure the grave mistakes are a thing of the past.
The city attorney tells us since we broke the story last year, he's heard from about 20 families who had problems with the record-keeping. We know one other family is suing the city, because a stranger ended up buried in one of their plots.