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Kansas City Cemetery Tells Woman They Can't Find Her Mother's Headstone

Ryan Mayer

Kansas City, MO (CBS LOCAL) -- A Kansas woman got an unpleasant surprise recently when she went to visit her mother's grave. Her mother's headstone was missing.

According to Fox 4 KC, Tierra Morrison said that she buried her mom at Lincoln Cemetery a decade ago because it was close to where she lived at the time. But, when she went to visit the grave site in March for what would have been her mom's 55th birthday, her headstone was nowhere to be found.

"I was confused," Morrison said. "I was upset, kind of freaked out, but I tried not to overreact."

Morrison reached out to the cemetery's owner Keith Slider and the two talked several times with Slider only providing vague answers about what had happened. This happened over and over again with the owner allegedly consistently changing the date of when the headstone would be found.

"First, it was Mother's Day that it would be found," Morrison recalled. "I didn't hear anything then. So I contacted him after Mother's Day. He said, 'Oh, we'll have it by Memorial.'"

Finally, when Morrison reached out once again last Friday, she was told that the cemetery had marked the grave site and still couldn't find the headstone. It was at that point that she pushed back on the cemetery to cover the cost of replacing the headstone. However, the owner never got back to her.

After the local media got involved in the story, Slider informed Morrison that the cemetery was not responsible for the headstone because Lincoln is a "non-endowed cemetery and patrons are responsible for whatever happens to their loved ones' graves."

There was a previous incident involving a missing headstone at the same cemetery back in 2015, but the headstone was eventually found buried underneath grass and the matter was resolved.

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