Susan Burns couldn’t believe what she found online.
A mausoleum built for her grandfather, Oscar Rosenberger, the owner of the once-famous San Telmo Cigar Company in Detroit, had been ransacked at the city’s historic Woodmere Cemetery. Thieves had stolen the ornate copper doors and a stained-glass window, leaving a family landmark designed by famed architect Albert Kahn damaged and exposed.
“I just found out about this, and I’m devastated,” Burns tells Metro Times. “They desecrated a sacred landmark, and I’m the only one left to find out about this.”
The theft occurred in late 2012 and was part of a broader wave of graveyard crimes at the 250-acre cemetery in southwest Detroit. Thieves targeted century-old mausoleums for bronze and copper doors, gates, and other metal memorials. A year earlier, vandals toppled headstones and destroyed statues across the cemetery, which was founded in 1867 and is the resting place of mayors, senators, judges, authors, lumber barons, and Civil War soldiers who were moved there after Fort Wayne was razed.
Burns, who lives in Florida, says she is incensed that no one from the cemetery notified her, even though she is the only living relative of Rosenberger.
“It’s disgusting, and they did nothing,” Burns says. “I can’t believe this. How dare they?”
Burns contacted me after she came across a story I wrote about the theft in January 2013.
Thirteen years later, on Tuesday, I visited Woodmere Cemetery and discovered that the damage had not been fully sealed. The front of the Rosenberger mausoleum, where the copper doors once stood, had been boarded up. But a rear opening where the stained-glass window had been removed was still open to the elements, and blue tiles from the ceiling littered the floor.
When a building is left exposed to the elements, rain, snow, wind, and freeze-thaw cycles can accelerate deterioration, quickly damaging interior finishes.
A woman who answered the phone at the cemetery office declined to comment, saying, “We don’t communicate with the press.”
Woodmere’s previous owners, Midwest Memorial Group LLC and Toronto-based Park Lawn, did not answer questions about why the opening wasn’t covered or why Burns was not contacted.
Everstory Partners, a Florida-based company that purchased Woodmere in October 2023 and operates more than 465 cemeteries across the country, declined to discuss “specific incidents or family issues publicly.”
But Alan Byrd, a spokesman for Everstory Partners, says the company is working hard to improve conditions at Woodmere.
“Since acquiring Woodmere in 2023, we have undertaken a comprehensive effort to modernize operations, strengthen day-to-day management, invest in the property, and improve the experience for the families who entrust us with their loved ones’ final resting place,” Byrd told Metro Times in a statement. “We understand how upsetting acts of vandalism can be for families and the broader community. Out of respect for families’ privacy, it is not appropriate to discuss individual situations publicly.”
Byrd encourages families with problems at the cemetery to contact Chris Strickler at cstri@everstorypartners.com “so we can better understand their specific concern and provide assistance in a thoughtful and respectful manner.”
Everystory Partners has come under fire for conditions at some of its other cemeteries. At Oakview Cemetery in Royal Oak, a family complained that its mausoleum had “insects, leakage, failed air conditioning and heating, and bad smells” in October 2024.
At York Memorial Park, a historically Black cemetery in Charlotte, N.C., a family filed a lawsuit against Everstory, claiming it was “burying babies on top of each other over a period of years” and that one area is dubbed “the hill of babies.” In the spring last year, a couple sued Everstory over “extremely disrespectful” conditions at Roosevelt Memorial Park in Virginia.
At Royal Oak Memorial Gardens in Brookville, Ohio, families complained last month of “damaged gravestones, poor conditions, and broken promises.”
Burns says she is now looking for a lawyer to file a lawsuit against the cemetery owners, arguing they should have tried to locate surviving relatives and alert them to the theft and damage.
“I don’t even know if my grandfather’s body is still inside,” she says. “How do I know if his body is even there?”
The cemetery has been the subject of litigation in the past. In 2020, the American Moslem Society of Dearborn sued Woodmere, alleging it violated a contract for burial space.
In life, Rosenberger was an influential figure in Detroit. He owned the city’s largest cigar factory, also designed by Kahn, and employed about 1,500 people, most of them women. He led the business until his death in 1918.
Burns says the mausoleum’s cultural and architectural significance only adds to her frustration.
“They need to fix that mausoleum,” Burns says. “They can’t replace that window. It’s irreplaceable. It’s priceless.”
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