The Oregonian | By Aimee Green | October 15, 2019
The mother of a 3-month-old baby who died in the 1990s has filed a $5 million lawsuit against the Oregon cemetery where her daughter was buried. She says she recently learned workers cracked open her daughter’s casket years ago, but failed to own up to it.
Janine Karvia’s lawsuit claims that workers at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in The Dalles created a gaping hole in one end of her daughter’s casket when they laid underground pipe across the little girl’s grave site. The lawsuit says the casket filled with dirt — “desecrating her daughter’s remains” — and Karvia only learned of this in September, when she had the casket dug up so she could cremate her baby’s remains.
“It’s just a rolling nightmare for me,” Karvia told The Oregonian/OregonLive Tuesday. “I have horrible dreams. …It’s so wrong. Shame on them. It’s heartless.”
A representative of the cemetery declined to comment on the lawsuit. The cemetery is also known as the Columbia Lodge No. 5 Cemetery.
Karvia says her daughter, McKenzie, was born in Portland in July 1996. Three months later, the girl suddenly came down with a bacterial infection in her blood, doctors chalked it up to colic and she stopped breathing at day care and died in November 1996, Karvia says.
Karvia says she chose to bury her daughter in The Dalles because her sister and biological father lived there at the time. But they no longer live there.
Earlier this year, as Karvia’s heart problems began to take their toll on her, she says she decided to have McKenzie’s body disinterred so she could cremate the remains and keep them with her at home in Tacoma. She says the plan was to have her daughter’s ashes mixed with her own when she dies.
Karvia says she also wanted to see McKenzie’s pink casket and remains one last time, for closure. That’s when she says she learned the elements had decomposed much of what was inside.
“I got to open up a box of dirt,” she said.
Karvia says the worker she was with said the white PVC pipe that was installed across the foot of the casket was for an irrigation system. The lawsuit states that the pipe looks as if it had been placed there in the last several years.
Karvia said a mortuary was able to sift through the dirt over two days and recover some of the girl’s bones.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Portland attorney Michael Fuller is representing Karvia.
