Woman sues cemetery after sinking waist-deep into her parents’ grave

A woman was just trying to pay her respects to her late mother and father when she suddenly found herself waist-deep in their grave. 

Joanne Cullen was visiting her parents’ burial plot at the St Charles Resurrection Cemetery in New York when she was swallowed by a sinkhole.

She had been fixing a bow on a wreath by the headstone of the burial plot for Evelyn and John Cullen when she began to sink, her lawyer said. 

‘It caused her to fall forward and smash her head on the tombstone,’ Joseph Perrini told the New York Post, adding that Cullen had cracked a tooth in the process. 

She then had to grab onto the sides of her parents’ own tombstone as she found herself ‘sinking into the ground’, he added. 

Cullen, 64, screamed for help, but no one in the cemetery could hear her. 

The sinkhole was formed by an underground void that the gravediggers left while backfilling a burial plot that was adjacent to Cullen’s parents, according to Perrini. 

‘Getting sucked into your parents’ grave when you go to visit them on a cool December afternoon with the sun going down, it’s terrifying and traumatizing,’ Perrini said. 

Now Cullen is suing the cemetery for $5million over the December 2016 incident.  

Cullen said she was traumatized by the incident and now suffers from nightmares, headaches, and a fear of open fields.

‘I will never go back there again,’ she said, adding that she now needs counseling.  

‘It’s outrageous that this should happen to anybody,’ Perrini said. 

‘We want to make sure the cemetery and employees learn from this. We want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.’