Long after hurricane, unearthed bodies remain unidentified

GOLDSBORO, N.C. — It was Father’s Day when Larry Monk got the frantic call from his sister: Their father’s burial vault was missing from its place in the cemetery.

Monk soon learned that wasn’t all. It had been gone for nearly two years, and the family only learned about it when another sister went to put flowers on the grave.

The vault of Raymond Monk had been sucked out of the ground by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. The tobacco picker, who also worked at a processing plant, had been buried next to his wife in Elmwood Cemetery in Goldsboro after he died at age 85 in 1985. Now his body was in one of 18 unidentified burial vaults unearthed by the flooding. It went unclaimed for months while the Monk family had no idea there was a problem.

City officials said they did their best to find the families of the 18. But Larry Monk said their efforts didn’t go far enough.

“I know he’s gone,” Monk said on a recent hot summer morning, tears running down his face as he stared at his parents’ burial site. “But the idea is, we put him here, next to our mama. And to go through this again, it’s bringing it all back.”

Rick Fletcher, the city’s director of public works, knows Monk is angry and hurting. “This happened almost two years ago, but to him, it happened a few weeks ago,” Fletcher said.

Hurricane Matthew smacked into North Carolina on Oct. 9, 2016, but the Neuse River waited three days to peak at 29.74 feet in Goldsboro, about 10 feet above flood stage.

Elmwood Cemetery, located on low-lying ground about a half-mile from the river, didn’t stand a chance against the rain and floods. Floodwaters of up to 6 feet inundated the 23-acre graveyard, leaving only the tops of its gates exposed, Fletcher said.

The water moved 36 ground-level vaults from their burial sites. Eighteen were fairly easily matched with their proper gravesite because they either were partially contained within their vaults or they had identification written on paper stored in water-tight tubes, city officials said.

The remaining 18 either didn’t have the tubes or the tubes were empty, Fletcher said.

Ground-level vaults, banned in North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd in 1999, aren’t buried underground. Instead, they sit just below the surface with the vault’s lid visible. Elmwood Cemetery dates back to 1874, when it was founded for African-Americans.

Fletcher and Timothy Irving, cemetery superintendent, are emphatic about one issue: The bodies were always handled with respect. None came out of a coffin, and they were quickly loaded into refrigerated trailers, Irving said.

Employees of a local funeral home volunteered to handle the remains, which were placed in new caskets and new vaults before being buried in a large plot, where they’re identified with numbers and letters that correspond to DNA taken by the Office of the State Medical Examiner, Fletcher said.

A lab in Pennsylvania has tested that DNA and will match it with the DNA contributed by families. After that’s done, the city plans to put a marker with the names of any unidentified remains at the gravesite.