North Carolina's Cemetery Commission has received 30 complaints against Montlawn Memorial Park since the start of 2020, its executive director, Glenn Cutler, confirmed to Obitley on September 30. Fifteen of them, half the seven-year total, arrived in 2022 alone. What those complaints concerned is not public.
The commission has never taken formal action against the cemetery. Cutler confirmed the 30-complaint total to WRAL in September, and the year-by-year numbers to Obitley this week.
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The complaints span 2020 through 2026: two in 2020, six in 2021, fifteen in 2022, four in 2023, none in 2024, one in 2025, and two so far in 2026.
By the Numbers
The year the complaints clustered
Fifteen complaints at one cemetery in one year invites a question: what happened in 2022?
The commission's numbers do not answer it. Cutler's office provided annual counts; it did not provide subject matter, and complaint records themselves are confidential under state law. WRAL requested copies in September and was refused, citing state code. The commission's own April 2022 minutes, public online, recorded seven Montlawn complaints in that quarter alone.
What is public is the corporate calendar. StoneMor Partners, Montlawn's owner since 2014, was taken private by Axar Capital Management; the deal closed November 3, 2022. A Montlawn funeral-home price list that took effect November 1 of that year, two days before the closing, is still posted on a StoneMor company website that hosts its price lists. Montlawn's complaint count for that year: fifteen.
None of that establishes what drove the complaints. It establishes only that the busiest complaint year and the ownership change share a calendar. What those fifteen families complained about remains an open question, and the commission is the one place that can answer it without identifying anyone.
Two regulators, two books
The 30 complaints sit on the Cemetery Commission's books. The North Carolina Attorney General's Office keeps its own: at least eight consumer complaints about Montlawn in recent years, WRAL reported in August. The Greene family's filing there runs 170 pages.
The Greene family told WRAL the commission said it "couldn't really do anything" about their burial mix-up at Montlawn. Commission President William Gaffney wrote that the burial errors arose from "mistakes and errors and not generally from overall poor cemetery management or operations," and that because the situation is considered rare, there is no standard remedy.
Fifteen complaints in one year is a test of that word. A cemetery that drew no more than six complaints in any other year drew fifteen in the year its corporate parent was taken private.
What the suits allege
Class actions are also accumulating against Montlawn's parent. One filed in federal court days before WRAL's August investigation involves Pine Forest Memorial Gardens in Wake Forest, where parents say they discovered another body in a plot they had purchased beside their son's grave. Another, which WRAL reported obtaining in early October, involves Gaston Memorial Park in Gastonia and a family that owned two plots side by side. Everstory owns both properties; a company spokesperson told WRAL the company is not commenting further on the pending litigation.
The Greenes have not sued. Their 170-page consumer complaint to the Attorney General remains their filing of record.
What happens next
Pine Forest's complaint counts are due next. Cutler's office is preparing them.
Obitley has asked Cutler's office, in general terms and without identifying anyone, what the 2022 complaints generally concerned. A single sentence of context would separate a spike driven by one recurring problem from a spike spread across many, and the counts alone cannot do that.
The commission's July 2026 minutes, which require board approval before release, are expected in late October. The count window itself starts in 2020, and the first publicly known Montlawn burial error predates it: the double-sold plot where Kizzie Sewell's husband was buried in 2014 came to light in 2018, and his body was moved by court order in 2019, as WRAL reported at the time.
What This Means for You
*Sources: Glenn Cutler, Executive Director, NC Cemetery Commission, email to Obitley, September 30, 2026; WRAL investigations, August 2026 and September 2, 2026 (Montlawn burial mix-ups, commission posture, Attorney General complaints, Pine Forest class action); WRAL, October 2026, via social posts (Gaston Memorial Park class action); WRAL, August 28, 2019 (Barnes exhumation); NC Cemetery Commission meeting minutes, April 20, 2022 (operations report: seven Montlawn complaints in the quarter); Houlihan Lokey transaction announcement (Axar Capital Management acquisition of StoneMor, closed November 3, 2022); Triangle Business Journal, July 2014 (SCI sale of Montlawn to StoneMor, $8.4 million).*
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