A family patriarch was not buried in the correct spot at the Mountain View cemetery where he and his wife purchased a burial plot, an attorney representing the cemetery’s former owners acknowledged Monday, but he said much of the delays in rectifying the situation stemmed from the cemetery’s current owners.
Opening statements and the first witness testimony was delivered Monday morning in the civil case brought by the children of Sidney Cooper Sr., who are suing the company that previously operated the Greenwood Memorial Park and Mortuary.
Cooper’s family says that after Sidney’s wife, Thelma Cooper, died in March of last year, it was discovered that Sidney’s body and casket was never buried in the plot the couple purchased in 1992.
Sidney Cooper’s casket was recovered about three months later, in another location within the same cemetery. By that time, the family had already been forced to bury Thelma Cooper alone, against her wishes, their attorney Eric Dubin told a San Diego jury last week.
On Monday, Toby Magarian, an attorney for SCI California Funeral Services, which previously owned the Greenwood Memorial Park and Mortuary, delivered his opening remarks to jurors.
Magarian said the family service counselor who helped the family with Sidney Cooper’s funeral arrangements marked the wrong spot for his grave on a form, which led to Cooper’s burial about one row over from the intended spot.
Magarian said that by the time the mistake was discovered, Greenwood had been sold to another company and Sidney Cooper had been deceased for 22 years.
While Dubin said it took three months to locate Sidney’s remains, Magarian said Greenwood’s new owners found the form bearing the incorrect location for Sidney’s grave and quickly informed the Cooper family where Sidney’s true burial location was.
One of Sidney’s daughters, Lana Cooper-Jones, was the first witness called and denied that Greenwood employees ever said they were confident of the location of her father’s remains.
Dubin told jurors that the misplacement of Sidney’s remains happened because of failures in SCI’s safeguards for verifying grave locations and poorly drawn maps that made it easy for groundskeepers and other cemetery employees to make mistakes. Magarian denied that claim, stating that the cemetery’s grounds crews didn’t rely on those maps.
As for the delays in correcting the situation, Magarian said he expected the Cooper children to testify about the emotional distress they underwent, but said much of that was due to the new cemetery owners telling the family conflicting information about the location of Sidney’s grave and taking too long to fix the issue.
Magarian said SCI also had no opportunity to rectify the situation for the Coopers, because they were not informed there was a problem until after they were served with a lawsuit. Even if they had known, SCI would not be able to operate on or excavate any graves on another company’s property, he said.
Sidney Cooper, affectionately known as the “Mayor of Imperial Avenue,” is credited with helping promote the Juneteenth holiday throughout San Diego by hosting Juneteenth events and celebrations with his family. Cooper-Jones testified that when her father moved to San Diego, locals were unaware of the significance of Juneteenth and so he did what he could to educate people of its history.
Along with owning a barbershop, where Thelma worked as a beautician, the family operated a produce stand in the back of the store and her father delivered medicine for a nearby drugstore, Cooper-Jones testified.
She testified that due to his love of the southeast San Diego community, he threw his support behind local business owners and would decorate the community during the holidays.
“He would say I want Imperial to look like La Jolla when he walked down the street to show that we’re proud of Imperial,” she testified.
