Daughter of late WWII vet fighting funeral company for compensation after grave found empty
CBC
Elizabeth Patrick was hoping this Remembrance Day would bring closure after a nearly decade-long search for her estranged father's grave led her to a cemetery outside of Winnipeg.
Instead, she’s trying to work with Service Corporation International, a multibillion-dollar U.S. funeral homes and services company, to find an amicable agreement after her father’s grave was found to be empty during disinterment at Green Acres Cemetery earlier this year.
Sgt. Gordon Patrick was a glider pilot for the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
He spent his final years in Winnipeg and died in 1973. He was buried without a headstone, since he had no family in Canada.
"No veteran should be left in a grave with no headstone and no marker, no memorial, no nothing," his daughter, Elizabeth Patrick, said via Zoom on Thursday.
In May, wanting to have her father's remains relocated to a cemetery in Ontario where her son is buried, Patrick — who lives in England — had the grave excavated. That's when it was found to be empty.
She said she initially had a positive and reciprocal relationship with Service Corporation International leading up to the excavation, and the company even agreed to waive its estimated $9,000 cost.
But she says communication with SCI, which owns Green Acres, has slowed since early June, after the RCMP forensics unit carried out the first of two ground-penetrating radar searches in an effort to find any trace of her father.
Patrick hired legal help and received a letter on July 30 from SCI's legal counsel.
The letter stated that "given the length of time that has passed since Sgt. Patrick’s interment, and the limited information contained in the records of the former owner of Green Acres Funeral Home and Cemetery," the company believes that "locating Sgt. Patrick’s remains on their property is unlikely."
SCI offered to pay for a custom headstone, according to Patrick.
She planned to move her father to the Field of Honour at the Woodland Cemetery in Burlington, Ont., where he would be buried beside his grandson, Patrick Moulden, a clearance diver with the Royal Canadian Navy before his death in 2022.
"Their position was, 'We'll pay for the headstone, but we'll install it in one of our cemeteries,' which obviously defeats the purpose of me going to this effort of finding my father, paying to have him disinterred, paying to have him reinterred so that he could be beside my son," Patrick said.
In their letter, SCI "offered to pay me $2,500 for damages and upset, and however you want to frame that," according to Patrick.
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