Ruling that the problems of the living should not disturb the dead, a Howard County Circuit judge yesterday refused to allow Evelyn Shew to dig up her husband's body from his mother's cemetery plot and move it to one Shew owns.
Judge James B. Dudley said Shew had not shown a pressing reason to move her husband, Harry, who has been buried for nearly five years at Elkridge's Meadowridge Memorial Park in a plot owned by Marie DeFlavis, his mother.
"If you buried [Harry Shew] in your back yard, you wouldn't speak to each other," Dudley said of the conflicts between Shew and DeFlavis, who sat at opposite sides of the courtroom.
"No matter where he is buried, you're not going to speak to each other," the judge said. "You don't like each other."
Evelyn Shew, a Severna Park resident, testified that DeFlavis had coerced her into burying Harry Shew in one of four plots DeFlavis owns in Meadowridge because she was distraught after her husband's death in a car accident in August 1992. Shew said there was no room for her to be buried next to her husband in Meadowridge, where her mother-in-law's plots have been earmarked for DeFlavis, her husband and her two sons, Harry and Johnny. Mrs. Shew asked the judge to allow her to move her husband to one of two plots in Glen Haven cemetery in Glen Burnie so they could be buried together.
She told Dudley she had been feuding with DeFlavis since Harry Shew's death -- a feud that was apparent in a handwritten note on the grave and in a lawsuit DeFlavis filed over $25,000 she said she lent the Shews before Harry Shew died. The note from DeFlavis said the plot belonged to DeFlavis and that the flowers there should not be touched.
Maria Shew, Evelyn and Harry Shew's 23-year-old daughter, testified that she wanted her father to be moved so he could be buried with her mother.
DeFlavis did not present her side of the case. Dudley ruled in her favor after the Shew family's testimony. Legally, Harry Shew could not be moved from DeFlavis' plot without her permission -- unless Dudley ruled that substantial reasons required the body's relocation.
"I just wanted my mother and father to lie in peace," Maria Shew said. "There is no peace right now."
Pub Date: 5/14/97
