On Wednesday, West Virginia police arrested a gravedigger for displacing an infant boy who was buried in 1982.
Last Thursday, someone called 911 after discovering a baby while decorating a grave at Baylous Cemetery in Salt Rock. An investigation determined that Matthew Fortner, 49, who was contracted by the cemetery, was digging a burial plot for someone else when he dug up the boy’s casket and discarded it by dumping it on a hillside, according to WOWK.
The baby, who was a few months old, was in the middle of the cemetery. His broken casket was discovered nearby, on a hillside. A criminal complaint stated that pieces of the baby’s broken casket matched fragments found inside the grave Fortner reportedly dug up.
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WCHS reported that the baby boy’s right arm and right foot were removed, but it’s unclear how that occurred.
“He [Fortner] was digging a grave that was next to this infant child’s grave, and he dug up the casket of this infant child, and instead of doing the right thing, he threw it over the hillside,” Cabell County Sheriff Doug Adams said, according to West Virginia MetroNews. “We’re still waiting on other things to get back from the lab and (state) medical examiner’s office.”
According to WSAZ, Fortner has a murder conviction for which he was sentenced to life with mercy in 1999. He was paroled in 2008, two years after his murder conviction was set aside and he was sentenced to attempted first-degree robbery.
Fortner is charged with disinterment or displacement of a dead body or part thereof, damage to a cemetery or graveyard, and violating protection of human skeletal remains, grave artifacts and grave markers. His bond was set at $105,000.
Fortner is due in court on April 10.
[Feature Photo: WOWK]
