People Visit Troubled Cemetery to Hunt for Graves of Loved Ones : Probe: Some find tombstones in the trash at Lincoln Memorial Park in Carson, which is under investigation.

In the second such case this summer, hundreds of bewildered people, many holding relatives’ hands for support, hunted Tuesday for their loved ones’ grave markers at a run-down Carson cemetery under investigation for a host of possible violations, from haphazard record-keeping to tampering with grave sites.

As police looked on, some dug through dumpsters filled with headstones that they said had disappeared from family plots at Lincoln Memorial Park, or rummaged among more stones stacked against walls. Others peered through cracks into a ramshackle mausoleum that, despite the hundreds of name plates on its sides, appeared empty.

Sifting through the grass clippings and used paint rollers in one trash bin, Yolanda Murray was searching for her father’s tombstone.

“He’s not over there,” she said, pointing to his burial site. “Maybe he’s in here.”

Earlier this summer, the state Cemetery Board took control of Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs after investigators discovered graves had been dug up and resold, with remains dumped into a pile.

A state source close to the Carson probe said the alleged violations at Lincoln appear to be at least as sweeping as those at Paradise.

“They are finding massive improprieties so far,” the source said. “And where there is smoke, there is fire.”

The owner/operator of the cemetery could not be reached Tuesday. Property and business records show the cemetery is owned by Lincoln Memorial Park Inc., which shares a Los Angeles office with the Hollywood Cemetery Assn., operator of the famed Hollywood cemetery.

A woman answering the telephones at the Hollywood Cemetery Assn. office said workers there were not taking calls about Lincoln. “There will be no comment about the cemetery,” she said.

Relatives of people who had been entombed or buried at Lincoln roved throughout the cemetery, finding that headstones no longer stood where they used to stand or that the earth around the grave site appeared to have been dug up.

Of her dozen or so friends and family members buried at Lincoln, Frances Haywood of Los Angeles could find the headstones for only three--a cousin, her grandmother and her baby boy, who was killed at the age of 3 in a 1971 car accident.

“My baby was OK,” Haywood said. “I don’t know how I would have held up if he was gone.”

One headstone that was not where it had been when she last visited a few months ago, she said, was that of her uncle, John B. Grimes, laid to rest in 1991. After searching most of the cemetery, she headed over to a small shop area, where dumpsters were filled with headstones dated as recently as 1993.

Against a wall were dozens of other headstones, some stacked, some lying on the ground.

As she approached, Haywood said, a worker picked up one of the headstones near the wall “to throw it in the trash, and I said, ‘Hey, that’s who I’m looking for. Here’s John B. Here is his headstone . . . in a big junkyard.’ ”

She put it in her trunk to take to his wife.

In addition to poor upkeep, visitors Tuesday found tracks from tractor tires across grave sites and headstones that were loose and appeared to have been pulled up.

Evidence of recent digging--including a swath of still-moist soil--was clearly visible around several headstones on the south side of the park, even though none of those gravestones carried a death date more recent than 1973.

Roosevelt Hudson first noticed something amiss at his mother’s grave site three weeks ago.

“I come here every month, after church,” Hudson said. “I came out here three weeks ago and somebody had been digging around my mother’s grave.”

When he spoke to cemetery workers about the digging, Hudson said, they were “evasive.”

Some relatives gathered at a weather-beaten mausoleum in the center of the cemetery, where most of the flower holders had fallen off the walls and some of the marble slabs were cracked or separated from each other.

One man had a high-powered flashlight that he shone into separations between the marble, revealing at least some areas within that appeared empty.

“I don’t think my grandmother’s in there,” said Dwaine Bell, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy who said that, as a boy in 1968, he had watched as her casket was put into the mausoleum.

Others said the name plates of their loved ones had been moved to a different location on the building.

Mary Yancy, like several others Tuesday, said she was told years before that the mausoleum was nearly full, but name plates on the building list burial dates as recent as 1994.

“When I buried my husband here, they told me that was it, it was full,” Yancy said. “That was 1977.”

Yancy said she had also been complaining for years about conditions at the cemetery.

A spokesman for the state Cemetery Board said only that officials had been working on the case for “a few days” and declined to comment further. Investigators at the site Tuesday were conducting private interviews with visitors.

Beverly Hills attorney Jeffrey Steinberger, who is involved in a class-action suit against Paradise, said he represents 250 people with relatives buried at Lincoln. But he estimated the number of plaintiffs could reach into the thousands given the vast size of the cemetery.

“Paradise is about the size of two football fields. This one is about the size of 10,” he said.

Shaking her head Tuesday as she walked through the dead and dying grass that covers much of Lincoln Memorial Park, one woman stopped, looked around and spoke quietly: “Lord, have mercy.”