DENVER—Just days before Memorial Day honoring the nation’s military, a national cemetery says it is replacing six gravestones because of a mix-up over who is buried in the graves.
The mistakes were discovered after the wife of 62-year-old Air Force Vietnam veteran Rick Sosias visited his grave and found the name of another man.
Cemetery spokesman Joseph Turnbach said six headstones were reversed, and the error has been corrected. The cemetery partially exhumed Sosias’ grave Wednesday to assure his wife the error has been corrected.
Bellina Sosias said her husband died of an aneurysm in March.
According to KMGH-TV ( ), Fort Logan put up a temporary grave marker to indicate where he was buried.
Bellina Sosias said she visited the grave where she thought her husband was buried for two months, but when the cemetery laid new sod and put up his new gravestone, she noticed Rick’s name wasn’t the one etched in granite.
“I freaked. Where are you? I know I am at the right spot. I got upset,” Sosias said.
After looking around, she found her husband’s headstone three rows down.
Turnbach said Wednesday the casket was uncovered so Sosias could identify the cemetery identification tag and the number on the inside of the crypt. He said the widow verified her husband was placed in the correct gravesite.
“We have never had a headstone placement error at Fort Logan National Cemetery. We regret that this situation occurred. Our staff failed to follow established protocol by not verifying placement of these six headstones against not only adjacent numbered stones, but also against records and the map,” he said in a written statement.
He said the caskets were in the correct gravesites, and only the headstones were not in the correct places.
Turnbach said earlier this year, he walked the cemetery and helped verify that all 110,000 gravestones were in the correct place. He said that the cemetery began testing a new mapping system and used a field test to review accuracy and found none of the tombstones were incorrect.
Turnbach said his staff made a mistake and quickly corrected it.
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Information from: KMGH-TV,
