Cemetery legal dispute ends in disinterment

January 15, 2026/Cemetery, Regulations/

A lengthy legal case of about four years that involved a Service Corporation International (SCI) cemetery and also included a well-known and succesful business family has ended in a disinterment ruling of the keepsakes and ashes in the grave according to this article from Oregon Public Broadcasting titled “After cemetery sold the same plot twice, a burial is undone”.

I won’t try to relate the entirety of the case here because the article is very well done and gives great information on the history of the case. However, it brings about a resolution to a situation where the same grave plot was sold twice by the cemetery and the issues that brings about.

Tanya Marsh, a law professor at Wake Forest University and author of The Law of Human Remains, made this comment in the article, “It’s not a wholly unprecedented case, but it is fairly rare”.

Here’s a short explanation of the case from the article:

“The dispute over who owned the burial plot was simple, Marsh said: In almost all cases the first buyer (the Reser family) has the right. But the question of whether the plot legally contained Harrison’s gravesite (FDD Editor’s Note: “Harrison” refers to the 2nd buyer family of the grave site where a portion of Mr. Harrison’s ashes are said to be buried), and what that means for Tin Nyo (Harrison’s mother) seeking damages, is more complicated.

Most laws regarding cemeteries were written at a time when they only applied to whole bodies buried in caskets. Cremation, however, has become substantially more common, Marsh said, leading to disputes over cremated remains that existing laws are ill-equipped to handle.

A key argument in the lawsuit was over whether the remains of Tin Nyo’s son were actually present at the burial site, and if she had breached her contract with the cemetery by putting them there. Skyline (Cemetery) said it had no record of ashes being buried there and that Tin Nyo told them the vault would contain only keepsakes. Tin Nyo and her family say they are still in possession of most of Harrison’s ashes, but that some of them were sprinkled in with a book of watercolors and poetry she made for her son and placed in the vault.”

Professor Marsh also made this comment, “Human behavior — that is, the things that we are doing in cemeteries — have in some ways outpaced the law. Who are we to judge what a grieving mother needs?”

According to the linked article, “After the disinterment which occurred in late December 2025, Tin Nyo and her husband, David Williams, said they will keep the grave marker and vault at their house for now. Their attorney, Gracie Nagle, is temporarily storing the stone bench. They don’t know where they’ll put them next. . . . .”

Tom Anderson
Funeral Director Daily

Funeral Director Daily take: Professor Marsh makes some very good points in this article which describes a situation that happened that is simply unfortunate. I get two main takeaways from the professor.

First, generally whoever buys the cemetery lot first will more than likely be the eventually proven owner and secondly, that cemeteries are being used in many different ways today in comparison to how they were used in the past, mainly for full-body burial, when most of the statutes and regulations of the cemeteries were developed. . . . . .That second fact points out that there may be many more disgreements between cemeteries and lot owners where current law is somewhat undefined when it comes to current consumer Death Care practices.

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