{"id":8415,"date":"2011-07-14T14:32:22","date_gmt":"2011-07-14T18:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=8415"},"modified":"2011-07-14T13:54:35","modified_gmt":"2011-07-14T17:54:35","slug":"ex-director-convicted-of-stealing-from-emmett-tills-cemetery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=8415","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Director Convicted Of Stealing From Emmett Till&#8217;s Cemetery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CHICAGO &#8212; The former director of a historic Black cemetery south of Chicago was convicted Friday in a money-making scheme that involved digging up bodies and reselling plots, a development that left still-bitter relatives reliving the grief of not knowing their loved ones&#8217; final resting place.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Carolyn Towns<\/strong>, 51, of Blue Island, pleaded guilty Friday and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, according to the Cook County state&#8217;s attorney&#8217;s office.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Towns<\/strong> was director of Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip &#8212; the burial site of lynching victim <strong>Emmett Till<\/strong> and blues singers <strong>Willie Dixon<\/strong> and <strong>Dinah Washington<\/strong> &#8212; when prosecutors say she and three workers desecrated hundreds of graves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Till&#8217;s<\/strong> grave wasn&#8217;t harmed, but his original glass-topped casket &#8212; a symbol of the civil rights movement because it was designed to show the world his mutilated body &#8212; was discovered in a garbage-strewn storage shed during the investigation. It has since been donated to the Smithsonian Institution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CHICAGO &#8212; The former director of a historic Black cemetery south of Chicago was convicted Friday in a money-making scheme that involved digging up bodies and reselling plots, a development that left still-bitter relatives reliving the grief of not knowing their loved ones&#8217; final resting place. Carolyn Towns, 51, of Blue Island, pleaded guilty Friday [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}