No apparent middle ground in row over cemetery plot mishap

If they had met, Kurt Payne suspects his mother would have liked Aaron Sutherland but that doesn’t mean they should now spend eternity side by side.

Sutherland, 22, is buried beside Payne’s mother, Elsie Payne, at McHenry County Memorial Park Cemetery in Woodstock due to an apparent bookkeeping mix-up. Sutherland, who died in October 2014, and Payne, who died earlier this year, didn’t know each and aren’t related.

Earlier this week, a lawyer for Sutherland’s mother filed a lawsuit alleging cemetery staff was negligent — and may have even used “deceptive business practices” — when they sold Sutherland’s family a plot that the Payne family had bought 1 1/2 years earlier. Sutherland’s mother, Tracy Staadt, told the Chicago Sun-Times that cemetery staff has said her son’s remains will have to be moved; she’s suing, in part, to stop that from happening.

Kurt Payne said Thursday that he’s not surprised at the turn of events.

“It didn’t take a great deal of imagination to know that this young man’s family was not going to be any happier than I am and that they would likely get a lawyer,” said Payne, 59, who lives in Crystal Lake.

Payne bought three plots, for a total of about $6,000, when his aunt died in April 2013: One for his aunt, one for his mother and one for himself — the plot where Aaron Sutherland’s remains are buried. Payne says he was told about the mistake in April of this year, when crews at the cemetery were preparing the grave for his mother.

Payne said cemetery staff apologized, claiming someone who no longer works for them made a bookkeeping error. He said he was promised Sutherland’s remains would be moved. And he had staff put that in writing.

A spokesman for the company that owns the cemetery said in an email earlier this week that they are “aware of the issue and are working to resolve the matter directly with the affected families.”

For now, Payne said, he has no plans to get a lawyer.

“I have no reason to do anything if they move that person to another location and that spot sits empty until I leave this earth,” Payne said.

But Staadt told the Sun-Times that she couldn’t bear the pain of having her son’s remains moved elsewhere in the cemetery.

It appears there is no middle ground.

“I sympathize with their problem of having to move their loved one, but I didn’t create the problem for them,” Payne said. “I’m sure that if that young man had met my mother, he would have liked her and they would have been friends, but there is no way he should be buried next to her for eternity over her son, due to the mistake of a cemetery.”

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