NESBIT, Miss. — A Mississippi family says they are still searching for peace, 15 years after burying a loved one.
The family says they’ve finally saved enough to buy a headstone, but now there’s confusion over where the body is actually buried.
“I’m not supposed to be out here hot, crying and guessing where my loved one is. It was your job to know where she is,” Sabrina McCarley said.
But that’s exactly what she’s doing.
McCarley lost her grandmother in 1999. That’s a day she says she remember like it was yesterday.
“You’re not going to forget where your loved one is placed. That’s not going to slip your mind,” she said. “I remember the day. I remember the tree. We all wore white.”
That’s the problem.
She remembers her grandmother being buried in one spot, but Greenview Memorial Cemetery in Nesbit, MS claims Sadie Mae Clark was laid to rest in another area.
This granddaughter doesn’t believe them, and says each Saturday she stops by the place she remembers.
“We are putting flowers down like, ‘I don’t know mom. I pray this is you right here, because they didn’t do their job,” McCarley said.
Since Clark didn’t have a headstone for so long, the marker in the ground somehow got misplaced over time.
The cemetery says that’s the root of the confusion.
“They’ll say, ‘Y’all took too long to get the headstone.’ You can’t put a timeline on people’s money,” McCarley said.
Since the family has finally saved enough to buy a headstone, McCarley wants to make sure it’s put in the right space.
“You are supposed to be able to pull out paperwork and say, ‘Well, ma’am, this is where she is buried.”
WREG reached out to Cedric Burnett, the president of Henderson Funeral Homes – which owns the cemetery.
He told us, they’ll get to it.
“I tried to assure them that she will get to showing them where the grave is,” Burnett said.
As they wait for proof, they say they’ll do whatever it takes.
“Sadie Mae Clark is not going to just blow over. We want something done. We want her found,” McCarley said.
The family says it comes to it, they will pay to dig up the body just to be sure.
The cemetery claims the secretary is just busy and will eventually pull the records and show them where Clark is buried.