Hundreds of graves mishandled at Arlington National Cemetery

Over 200 bodies may have been misidentified or misplaced at Arlington National Cemetery, the Army said on Thursday. Arlington National Cemetery’s superintendent and deputy have been ousted following a newly released Pentagon report revealing misidentified graves and poor record keeping.

The cemetery’s outdated practice of tracking all burials on paper was poorly equipped to handle the cemetery’s average schedule of thirty funerals a day. This mismanagement has led to bodies being buried one on top of the other, urns of ashes being discovered in dirt heaps.

Dorothy Nolte’s sister was interred in one of the 211 “mismanaged” burials. She says that Arlington moved her sister at the cemetary without telling her. Mark Benjamin, writer for Salon.com, was the reporter who discovered the story of Nolte’s sister and called to let her know. He’s been investigating the story for over a year.