Women Sentenced to Jail in Plan to Resell Grave Sites

Two family members who owned and ran a cemetery in Santa Fe Springs were sentenced to jail time and each fined $500,000 Friday for their roles in a scheme to dig up and resell grave sites.

In May, Alma Fraction, 70, owner of the Paradise Memorial Park, and her 32-year-old daughter, Felicia, who managed the cemetery, pleaded no contest to three counts each of unlawful use of endowment care funds.

On Friday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Morris B. Jones sentenced the elder Fraction to one year in the County Jail and five years’ probation and ordered her to pay $500,000 in restitution, said a representative at the district attorney’s office. Her daughter received the same probation and fine, but was sentenced to 180 days in jail.

Alma Fraction’s 50-year-old son, Victor Fortner, had pleaded guilty to 69 felony counts, including criminally disinterring human remains and multiple sale of the same parcels of land. He is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 9.

As a groundskeeper and gravedigger, Fortner oversaw the day-to-day operations of the cemetery. Investigators alleged that he ordered workers to dig up thousands of old graves--some dating back to the 1930s and ‘40s. The plots were resold, and the human remains were put in a 7-foot-high, 50-foot-long dirt pile behind a toolshed.

Authorities also discovered instances in which six to seven bodies were buried on top of one another.

The scandal surfaced in 1995 during a series of investigations by the now-defunct state Cemetery Board, which responded to complaints that Paradise Springs was so rundown that it posed a health hazard.

Fortner allegedly admitted to investigators that he had dug up coffins and resold plots but claimed that he did not know the practice was illegal, said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials.

Records on about 3,000 illegal disinterments were kept at the cemetery, deputies said.