If the cemetery is abandoned, who becomes responsible?

(Undated) — The current owners of Suburban Memorial Gardens, a Conewago Township cemetery, remain in an Ohio state prison serving sentences for fraud.

That was one of the problems raised at a House Majority Policy Committee meeting on Wednesday.

The consensus among the 50 people who gathered in a meeting room at Northern York County Regional Police Department was that nobody really wants Theodore and Arminda Martin in York County at all except to prosecute them here on fraud charges and possibly get some money back for the people they defrauded here.

In October, the Martins pleaded guilty to multiple counts of theft for defrauding families who purchased plots and headstones for a cemetery the Martin’s owned in Ohio. Theodore, 54, was sentenced to five years in prison. Arminda, 47, was sentenced to four and half years.

In Pennsylvania, the Martins are under federal indictment for allegedly defrauding 200 families out of $500,000 between 2010 and 2016.

On Wednesday, in what was described as a “fact-finding mission,” four York County state representatives – Republicans Keith Gillespie, Stan Saylor and Kristin Phillips-Hill and Democrat Carol Hill-Evans – heard from four women who were allegedly defrauded by the Martins, two members of the cemetery/funeral business and retired York County Judge John S. Kennedy, among others.

The public hearing raised more questions than it answered as Gillespie, who hosted the meeting, expected.

Here are five takeaways from the meeting:

1. The Orphans’ Court branch of the York County Court of Common Pleas has audit oversight of cemeteries. Kennedy, who presided over Orphans’ Court for several years, could not remember an audit being brought before him. Suburban Memorial Gardens has not been audited since 1994.

3. Pennsylvania law says a cemetery owner is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a cemetery. Volunteers have continued to maintain the graves and grounds at Suburban Memorial Gardens since the Martins walked away from it. So, “who is the owner when (a cemetery) is abandoned?” asked Elam Herr, assistant executive secretary of the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors.

4. The Martins will be returned to Pennsylvania to face charges here after serving their prison sentences in Ohio, Gillespie said.

5. “Pennsylvania law is grossly inadequate in protecting those who pre-paid (for burials),” said Victoria Knisely, one of the Martins’ alleged victims.

 

This story comes to us through a partnership between WITF and The York Daily Record.