A visitor to the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Buchanan drove into some headstones last week, and now the city clerk is working to see they get repaired.
Buchanan City Clerk Kalla Langston focuses mostly on voter registration and elections but she also maintains city records, and that includes the city’s Oak Ridge Cemetery.
On Thursday Langston says someone was driving through the cemetery when their vehicle malfunctioned, perhaps a stuck throttle, and they accidentally damaged seven headstones.
Langston says she first wanted to notify the families of the people whose headstones were hit.
"You don't want to go out there and visit a loved one and see the tire tracks, and maybe some scrapes on the headstone," Langston says. "And we wanted to be able to keep them updated, as well, as the process goes on."
Langston says local funeral homes no longer had contact information for their loved ones. So on Sunday she posted their names on Facebook, and by Monday morning she had reached all seven families.
"Families have been very, very nice about it, more concerned about the driver than anything. To me that's like my worst nightmare, is something happening out there at the cemetery and then having to call the families and hear how much pain it's caused them."
Now the city will work with the driver’s insurance company to replace or repair the stones.
