PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — The father of a 4-year-old Utah boy crushed to death by a tombstone while taking pictures with his family testified Thursday that he turned from his camera to see his son looking at him as he lay trapped under the 250-pound stone.
Zac Cheney took the stand in a family lawsuit alleging that his son Carson died after the cemetery association allowed the stone to get dangerously weak with shoddy maintenance and failed to warn people about possible danger, including that headstones had fallen before.
“He had his eyes open and he was looking at me, and he was just gasping, trying to breathe,” Cheney said.
The boy was caught between the headstone and footstone and died of a head injury.
The Glenwood Cemetery Association contends that the cemetery was well-maintained and the 1889 headstone was solid before the boy started playing on it July 5, 2012.
Cheney, his wife and two sons had come to the picturesque cemetery after a family friend asked Cheney to take pictures amid their reunion at a nearby Park City, Utah, resort.
Carson Cheney was trying to pop out from behind the tombstone to make other children smile for the camera, said the family’s lawyer, Ron Kramer. The children were restless, so the boy’s mother had encouraged him to help by pretending to be a leprechaun, Kramer said.
The cemetery opened in 1885 for silver miners and their families, but as the industry faded, it fell into disrepair. The association restored the cemetery and welcomed the public, including school groups that did rubbings on gravestones, Kramer said.
Carson’s family says steel dowels that attached Michael Horan’s headstone stone to its base rusted out over the years, and it was repaired with construction adhesive. They are seeking more than $300,000 in damages.
The association denies fixing the stone. Attorney Paul Belnap said the Horan family and volunteers had been making regular inspections in the months before the boy’s death and as recently as two days before. They did not find any outward problems with the stone, he said.
The cemetery was closed for six weeks after the boy’s death, and when it reopened, the association posted signs asking people not to touch the headstones and to stay on footpaths.
There have been other cases of injuries and deaths from a falling tombstone in recent years.
In June 2012, the month before Carson’s death, a 4-year-old North Carolina girl was killed when a massive cross fell off a tombstone as she played before Bible study class.
The following year, a cemetery worker in Texas died after a tombstone weighing about a ton fell on him in Edinburg.
In May, a 4-year-old boy in Odessa, Texas, died after a tombstone fell on him while he was visiting a cemetery with his family.
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