Woman claims Ypsilanti cemetary lost her father

YPSILANTI, Mich. (WJBK) - A woman tries to pay a visit to her father's gravesite at an Ypsilanti cemetery and makes a devastating discovery.

Her father's gravesite was gone.

A day hasn't passed since Isaac Dixon died - that Lujuana Trice says she doesn't think about her beloved father.

"I didn't know how to cope with it was too hard," said Trice. “We were very close, very close," she said. "That was my best friend."

She was only 16 when he passed away. When she went to check on him, she  walked into his room just as he took his last breath.

In January 2001, family and friends buried the 37-year-old at the West Lawn West Cemetery in Ypsilanti. They even had a special headstone made with a Cadillac emblem because her dad loved the cars. Trice says it was one of the hardest days of her life.

Trice says she finally found the strength to return to the cemetery 15 years later. She brought her family back to visit her dad right to the spot where she remembered he was laid to rest -- but his gravesite was gone.

Losing a parent is already hard and when you finally get the nerve to come back to want to see him especially like my father," she said. "And to know he is not here or where he was supposed to be, so I could sit there and be with him."

Trice claims Westlawn West, now called Sunset Hills Memorial lost her father.

"I just wanted to be close to him and he wasn't there," she said.

Trice went to management, they told her there was no record of her father. She says she showed them Dixon's death certificate which states where he was buried, the receipt from where the gravestone was delivered and records from the funeral home which shows her father was buried at this cemetery, but it didn't make a difference.

"All they are telling me is we are going to look for him but without records we don't know what we can do," she said.

Trice says she has been getting the run around for weeks with the woman on the phone saying she had it handled.

"I said what does that mean," Trice said. "Did you find the grave, did you find her father's body? All she did was hang up."

What's even more disturbing, Trice says groundskeepers told her they have located several bodies, but they don't know who they are.

Trice has since filed a complaint with the state and the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department.

But in the end she says all she wants is to know where her father is, so their family can finally can pay him the respects he deserves.

"We have all been dealing with this horror," Trice said. "We just want some closure we just want to know what happened with dad, that's all."