Bone Fragments Found At Burr Oak Determined To Be Human Remains

ALSIP, IL — The Cook County Medical Examiner has confirmed that a bone fragment and teeth found last week in historic Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip came from human remains. A family looking for a loved one’s gravesite stumbled upon a human jawbone and teeth.

The family immediately contacted cemetery staff and Cook County Sheriff’s Police, Fox 32 Chicago reported. The bone fragments, which were found May 22, are believed tied to the mass grave desecration in 2009, when employees were caught selling and removing remains from occupied graves and burying new bodies in their place.

Cook County Sheriff’s Police believe the bone fragments, which were found May 22, may be tied to the mass grave desecration scandal, in 2009, when employees were caught selling occupied graves in the northern section of the cemetery.

“[Due] to recent disruption to the soil due to ongoing burials, the bone is believed to have been part of the original grave desecration in 2009,” a Cook County Sheriff’s spokesperson told Patch. “The investigation is ongoing, but there is no evidence of foul play or new criminal activity at this time.”

More than 200 graves were moved and remains thrown into a pile. In some cases, skeletal remains were smashed by a hammer, according to news reports from that time. Approximately 1,500 bone fragments were found. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office said employees got away with it because the grave sites were older and seldom visited. The FBI was brought in to assist Cook County investigators in their investigation.

The original glass-topped casket of civil rights icon Emmett Till was discovered decaying under a tarp in a shed, after the grave had been exhumed in 2005 because Mississippi authorities would not reopen the case unless family members could prove Till was buried at Burr Oak. Till’s remains were reinterred in a new casket.

Two employees received prison sentences, the other received probation.

Burr Oak was founded in 1927 to accommodate the many Black families that migrated from the south to Chicago in search of jobs. Many Chicago-area cemeteries would not bury African Americans, so Burr Oak was established to give Blacks a proper burial place, according to the cemetery's website.

The cemetery is the final resting place for famous athletes and musicians, such as blues singers Dinah Washington and Willie Dixon, heavyweight boxing champ Ezzard Charles and former players in the Negro baseball league, and hundreds of Black Chicagoans who broke through the glass ceiling in their respective fields, like Mary T. Washington Wylie, the first African American female CPA and a “woman of vision.”

The Cook County Medical Examiner is working to identify the fragments.