Unearthed bodies in N.C. remain unidentified

‘16 hurricane wrecked graves in old cemetery

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 had been buried next to his wife in Elmwood Cemetery in Goldsboro after he died at age 85 in 1985. But his body was in one of 18 burial vaults that were unearthed by the flooding and remain unidentified. It went unclaimed for months while the Monk family had no idea there was a problem.

City officials say they did their best to find the families of the 18. But Larry Monk says 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.

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. Floodwaters of up to 6 feet inundated the 23-acre graveyard.

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 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.

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.

Meanwhile, a question remains for Monk: Why the city couldn’t find him or his seven living siblings. Raymond and Lucy Monk had 11 children, eight of whom survive.

“My problem is they could have found us,” Monk said. “No ifs, ands or buts about it.”

Irving and another employee researched obituaries in the library to find survivors and located one relative that way. They also contacted funeral homes, but were unable to get anything useful.

Could the city have done anything else to find the families? In retrospect, Irving thinks so. For one thing, he says, they could have published the names.

On the other hand, “it seems like it might have been insensitive,” especially in the chaos of the months immediately after the storm, he said. “I don’t know.”

Gerry Broome The Associated Press Larry Monk stands where his father was buried beside his mother’s grave July 11 at Elmwood Cemetery in Goldsboro, N.C. Flooding unearthed his father’s vault and a number of other graves at the cemetery in 2016 following Hurricane Matthew.