Buried

NEWARK, N.J. -- A potter's field that became a garbage dump contains more than the 18,000 bodies originally believed buried there, a new study says.And it is possible the sliver of land in an industrial area near the airport and an Anheuser-Busch brewery could hold as many as 200,000 bodies, according to the study by Malcolm Pirnie, a White Plains, N.Y., environmental engineering firm.The city ordered the study as part of a court-ordered restoration of City Cemetery, where people without money to pay for a funeral were buried between 1869 and 1954.

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- You haven't seen this much love since Sammy Davis Jr. was blowing kisses to the crowd on "The Tonight Show."Tiger Woods and Fuzzy Zoeller got along so well during the second round of the Masters yesterday that you almost swore someone at Disney's writing lab was scripting the scene as an obligatory happy ending. It was amazing that a shaggy dog didn't gallop onto the 18th green and start licking everyone.Remember the fateful question, why can't we all just get along? Well, we can, it seems -- after a long and purposeful silence, an exchange of statements and corporate positioning, numerous apologies and a year to cool off, and with a sizable portion of the sporting world watching every muscle twitch for any hint of a juvenile flare-up.

There are new signs of life in Annapolis' historic Brewer Hill Cemetery, and yesterday dozens gathered on the hallowed ground to celebrate them.Chrysanthemums line a new gravel path, hundreds of stone markers have been cleaned and straightened. Grass covers patches of dirt once so eroded that caskets poked out of graves and skeletons lay exposed.Such vital signs attest to the efforts of descendants to undo years of neglect and deterioration at Brewer Hill, the state capital's first black burial site.

Butch Williams guesses that in 25 years at the U.S. Naval Academy, he's seen to it that well over 1,000 of the nation's best and brightest have gone with dignity to their rest.As supervisor of tractor operations, the Annapolis native heads the eight-person grounds-keeping and grave-digging crews that prepare burial sites and trim the grass and shrubs of the 129-year-old cemetery.His job puts him face to face with the history and heroes of the Navy."Sometimes you realize what you just did that particular day. You'll realize who that person was you put in the ground," said Williams, a smiling man with a gold, star-shaped filling in one tooth and wearing a white leather baseball cap. "And I can say, 'Yeah, I was there.

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.

The family of John D. Minick, who was buried in Laurel in 1987 in an already-occupied grave, has filed a $15 million lawsuit against Maryland National Memorial Park and its parent company.The suit, filed last month in Prince George's County Circuit Court, accuses officials of the cemetery along U.S. 1 of intentionally misleading Mr. Minick's widow and other relatives about the contents of gravesite 145 A, in the veterans section of the cemetery. The suits asks for more than $5 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages.

Marcos Sandoval fingers his beeper and perches himself on the arm of a chair in the apartment of his lifelong friend, Arcadio Guerra. Mr. Guerra's companion of six years, Maria Rios, sits slumped in a couch across the way, her hand over her chest.Just 24 hours earlier, Mr. Guerra, a Guatemalan immigrant who ** worked as a cook in a Little Italy restaurant, had been shot to death during his nightly walk in Patterson Park. Mr. Sandoval, a 37-year-old Owings Mills resident, knows the job of making burial arrangements will fall to him. Ms. Rios, by her own admission, is too strongly in the grip of "la pena negra," the black pain of losing a loved one. Still, there is one issue they must decide, now, together.

GODFREY, Ill. -- It's the same striped flag Americans display everywhere, except this one is draped in black. It hangs from the eaves in front of the garage of Judy and Jack Orrill, who lost a son in Iraq last week.Sgt. Michael Robinson, 23 -- Mrs. Orrill's son and Mr. Orrill's stepson -- was a mechanic and gunner aboard one of the two U.S. helicopters shot down by U.S. fighter jets. A fun-loving young man who was Army through and through, he will be buried in a small country cemetery Monday.

Carroll County officials say they were surprised to learn two months ago that the state had declared in 1988 that it was illegal for builders to bury stumps and other construction debris at new house sites."

Imagine walking out to pick up the morning paper and discovering a gaping hole in your driveway. Or mowing your grass and having the wheel of your mower swallowed up by the earth. Or watching your children dodge a 10-foot pit as they play ball in the yard.A number of home owners in Carroll don't have to imagine any of these possibilities; they have experienced them. In the past four years, 52 of the 300 sinkholes reported to the county's Bureau of Water Resource Management were created by decaying construction debris that was buried by home builders.

Edgar Franklin Kessler, III, Buried at Houston's V.A. National Cemetery. www.jeterfuneralhome.com.

The stream has been hidden for years, buried under the streets of Southwest Baltimore's poorest neighborhoods, almost forgotten. Only when it rains does the stream come alive, an underground current that carries with it the litter of storm drains - plastic bags, soda cans and other trash. It emerges near the Carroll Park golf course, disgorging into a rocky bed of the Gwynns Falls that holds a fetid cocktail of sewage and garbage. Far more dangerous is the pollution that the naked eye can't see - nitrogen, zinc and lead from automobile exhaust, among other sources.

ACRE, Israel -- The last mourners were saying goodbye to Shimon Zribi and his young daughter, Mazal, their shrouded bodies buried side by side in dirt the color of henna. A few feet away, down a rocky hillside, women were already sobbing over another dead man, Albert Ben-Abu. One funeral hadn't even ended when another began. Israel yesterday buried its dead, killed a day earlier in the Jewish state's single bloodiest day in more than three weeks of fighting. Five of the dead were residents of this northern coastal city who had emerged from bomb shelters, thinking the coast was clear, only to be cut down by Hezbollah rocket fire; the other three were Israeli Arab youths who had leapt from their car for safety, only to take the direct hit that left not a scratch on their vehicle.

Leonard Zandel trudged through the 2-foot-high grass at Rosa Bonheur Memorial Park in Elkridge, looking for the graves of the pets that he and his wife began burying there 20 years ago. He knows his four-footed friends - three dogs, a turtle and a cat - are laid to rest by a tree on the property. But the grass and leaves have taken over, showing no sign of the grave markers. "I've never seen it like this before," said Zandel, who is among a number of pet owners disgruntled to learn that the cemetery has closed without notice.

Steve Sklar's small, windowless office is at one end of a squat state building in downtown Baltimore. To one side of him is the office of the regulator of CPAs and sports agents. To the other is the man overseeing heating and air conditioning contractors. Elsewhere on the third floor are bureaucrats who monitor foresters, bay pilots, cosmetologists and barbers. Sklar's bailiwick is cemeteries. Some of those other regulators may experience seasonal peaks of activity. Next week is one for Sklar.

Authorities opened a criminal investigation yesterday to determine who buried 12 explosives -- including a fat 4,000-pound bomb of the kind dropped from airplanes during World War II -- at a former military shipyard along the water in remote southern Baltimore. But the day seemed to yield as many questions as answers, with military officials suggesting some of the bombs had been manufactured during different periods, one as late as the Vietnam War. And they said the bombs could have been buried on the industrial site in Fairfield as recently as the mid-1990s.

Six months ago, Colette Searls would have been shocked if someone had told her that Buried would make it to the finals of the American College Theater Festival. An original puppet piece about the casualties of war - conceived and directed by Searls, an assistant professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County - Buried is one of six works by university theaters nationwide that have been invited to the finals of the 36th annual festival. It will be performed by 10 of Searls' students at Washington's Kennedy Center next month.

For 89 years Neo Hackett was missing, buried in a hillside cemetery of anonymous graves where the only regular visitors are the wind, the autumn leaves and the man who mows the lawn. No one knew he was there. No one was looking for him. But nearly three years ago, historian Janice Hayes-Williams set out to find the names of hundreds of African-American men and women sent to the state's psychiatric hospital in Crownsville - and eventually buried there in numbered, nameless graves. She didn't know whether it was an impossible task, and she started in no particular hurry.

A cold wind whipped through Section 60. It stripped cherry blossoms from their branches, sending old buds and new to the muddy ground like spent confetti. It brought limp flags to life, masking the not-quite-silent background hum of funerals -- stifled sobs, cleared throats and hushed voices -- with the crisp and gently reassuring sound of fabric slapping itself. And it made Joe Rippetoe's pesky right shoulder so stiff that, when it was time to salute -- to face the general, accept the flag and hear the words, "On behalf of a grateful country ..."

WAUSEON, Ohio -- To the well-meaning citizen, the clues police have offered seem everywhere: a water pump, a woodpile, a shade tree, some wire-grid fencing, a weathered building in the distance. Those normally benign features of the Midwestern countryside have taken on a darker cast this summer in many communities near the exit ramps of Interstate 80. Somewhere on this highway, police said, a New Hampshire man who confessed to killing his two children and fleeing across the country with their bodies decided to pull off and bury them.