CARAWAY, Ark. — A Caraway family’s grief lingers, months after an unexpected discovery derailed funeral plans for a Vietnam War veteran who now lies in the wrong grave.
Jim Taylor, a truck driver and Caraway resident, is fighting to have his uncle, Grover Fred Baker, moved to the burial plot Baker purchased more than four decades ago. The issue came to light last December, just an hour before Baker’s funeral, when a city worker digging the grave encountered an occupied vault in the space reserved for him.
“When I walk through the door [at City Hall], they tell me that there’s somebody buried in my uncle’s burial plot,” Taylor said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Baker, a Vietnam veteran who served three years in the U.S. Army, had owned three cemetery plots at Caraway Cemetery off Cemetery Road since 1983. Two were used for his parents’ burials, and the third was intended for his own. However, officials have been unable to identify the individual buried in Baker’s reserved site or how that burial was allowed to occur, according to Caraway Water Clerk Cathy Smith.
“We don’t know who is buried there, and we don’t know who it is,” Smith said, noting that no current city staff or board members were in office when Baker purchased the plots.
To avoid delaying the ceremony, city officials offered Taylor a selection of alternative burial sites. Taylor agreed to one, and Baker was buried in an isolated section of the graveyard on the northwest side. Taylor says he only approved the alternate plot as a temporary solution until the original site could be cleared and his uncle laid to rest beside his parents, as intended.
But city authorities say they made no such promise.
“Once a body is buried, you have to go through a lot of red tape... to exhume that body and put it somewhere else,” Smith explained. “No one ever told him that they would move that body and put Mr. Fred there.”
The mix-up has left Taylor feeling he’s failed the uncle who had entrusted him with final arrangements.
“He entrusted me to take care of him when he couldn’t, and he done that for me when I was a kid,” Taylor said. “And now I feel helpless to hold up my end of the bargain.”
Taylor has delayed installing Baker’s headstone and military plaque, saying they belong next to his uncle’s parents, on the north side of the cemetery. Meanwhile, the mystery of the person buried in Baker’s original plot—and how to fix the mistake—remains unresolved.