Dylan Brogan
News-Roselawn-09-04-2017
Reymond Blazys is spending Labor Day fighting to get his job back. The 58-year-old gravedigger says he was fired for reporting shoddy, drunken work at Roselawn Memorial Park in Monona and other cemeteries in Wisconsin. In Blazys’ mind, he was given a pink slip by Pennsylvania-based StoneMor Partners L.P. for “just doing the right thing.”
“I’ve been doing this since I was 12 years old. This is all I know. My father was a gravedigger. His father was a gravedigger,” Blazys says. “My old man instilled in me, while we were working in the cemetery, always do everything right the first time so you don't have to do it again later. I take pride in what I do."
Blazys filed a lawsuit in Dane County court on August 30 seeking reinstatement and back pay from StoneMor. The lawsuit alleges that Blazys’ coworkers were “often inebriated and high” resulting in careless work and ghastly mistakes. On several occasions, Blazys says he caught co-workers “boozing it up.”
“[Co-workers] wouldn't dig graves deep enough. They would desecrate other graves already in the ground and then laugh about it. It was a mess. Like they had just gotten out of the bar,” Blazys tells Isthmus. “They were [frequently] busting into drainage pipes so graves were flooded all the time. And the water smelled like death.”
In a November 2015 incident, Blazys witnessed a co-worker “violently pound” the bucket of a backhoe into a concrete grave box to push it into an insufficiently deep grave. As a result, the backhoe broke through the concrete and the casket exposing a corpse. The grave was not fully drained and the body was submerged in water. According to Blazys’ complaint, the co-worker said “I won't do that drunk anymore.”
“It’s consecrated ground. I honestly believe it. You have to respect the dead. Have to,” Blazys says. “It’s wrong. And even thinking about it now, I think of my old man. Do it right the first time.”
That’s what Blazys expected the company to do. “I honestly believed StoneMor would handle it,” he says. “That they'd take care of all the wrong I was seeing.”
Blazys was hired by Bronze Stone Group to build concrete grave boxes at Roselawn in 2015. He was soon doing other cemetery maintenance work at the Monona memorial park, Glenview Memorial Gardens in Ixonia and other cemeteries in the state. StoneMor bought Bronze Stone Group’s Wisconsin cemeteries in August 2016. StoneMor is one of the largest deathcare companies in the country, owning more than 300 cemeteries in 27 states and Puerto Rico.
Blazys saw the ownership change as an opportunity to address the behavior he witnessed from co-workers. Darin Keener, a regional maintenance manager, and other StoneMor higher-ups visited Roselawn shortly after the purchase. Blazys told him about co-workers being drunk and high on the job. According to the complaint, Keener said “he would address the problems.”
In late September, Blazys saw “no indication” that his concerns were being addressed. So he twice called a tip line described in his employee handbook as a “third-party security voice-ethics line” to anonymously report “concerns.”
On Oct. 5, three representatives from StoneMor flew in from out of state. Blazys once again reported the incidents, now described in the lawsuit, and provided photos and videos to back up his claims. He also told the executives that he did not feel safe working around his co-workers when they were “inebriated” and asked for a transfer.
Instead, Blazys says Keener accused him of “stirring the pot” and told him he’d “have to go." “They didn’t like me complaining about what was going on.”
StoneMor declined to be interviewed by Isthmus. John McNamara, director of investor relations at StoneMor, did provide a statement that the publicly-traded company is “aware of the lawsuit. The only comment we have at this point is that the allegations are false and without merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves in court if necessary.”
After terminating the whistleblower, StoneMor initially contested Blazys unemployment insurance claim but eventually dropped its objections and he was able to collect benefits. Since being fired, the 58-year-old has struggled to find work and is homeless. He sleeps in his car most nights and the lack of a permanent address has made it even tougher to land employment.
But Blazys has no regrets. In fact, he wishes he would have been more forceful when sounding the alarm. The third-generation gravedigger thinks back to the lessons his father taught him about reverence for the dead at St. Casimir Cemetery in Chicago.
“You have to respect it, man. That’s how I was brought up. Do the right thing,” Blazys says. “I went to work with a song in my heart every morning…. I love doing this, I really do. Like in the spring, getting the flowers from Home Depot and putting them in. ‘Let's make it look pretty.’ I love that."
Blazys is asking a jury to decide whether he was wrongfully terminated. He says wants to be reinstated at Roselawn.
"So everybody, when they see me, will know that I’m keeping everything in check. That’d really make me happy,” Blazys says. “Now everything is going to be done the right way because Reymond’s around and he ain't screwing around. I would love to have my job back. I would love it.”
