More than 250 clients of Green Acres Memorial Park took advantage of their first chance to meet with top state regulators Thursday, seeking answers in person and as a group.

“I just can’t find my deed,” said Robert Bryant, who purchased a grave marker with his name and that of his wife at the 15-acre cemetery on U.S. 80 at her death 18 years ago. “Evidently, over the 18 years, I’ve either lost it or thrown it away. I went up to the courthouse and they said it never was recorded.”

Starting in January, Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann took legal steps to hold the owners of Green Acres accountable, which have culminated in the business being operated in court-ordered receivership and cemetery records in state custody.

“I just want to get it straight,” Bryant said. “I’m getting up in age. I want to be assured that my children don’t have to worry about whether I’ll be buried out there by my wife or not.”

When Bryant made his payments, Mississippi had no law governing management of prepaid burial funds and filing of deeds to burial spaces in public land records was not routine. Bryant, now 72, said he’ll probably need to pay a second time for matters he believes were done and settled.

The session with a spillover crowd in the Warren County Circuit Courtroom was tinged with similar personal situations and emotions.

Court records show Hosemann acted after more than $373,000 was discovered to be missing from the cemetery’s pre-need trust account, the fund that is supposed to hold money clients have the option to pay in advance for merchandise such as vaults and standard stone or metal grave markers and time-of-need services such as opening and closing graves. As of Sept 30, 2008, the trust’s balance was just $221.60. In March, Harry Sharp was chosen by the state as head of a receivership in charge of all the cemetery’s financial and personnel dealings.

Dave Scott, chief of the state’s Business Regulation and Enforcement Division, said part of the money trail also includes more than $600,000 that was transferred to Houston-based Mike Graham and Associates when it purchased Green Acres in 2001 — making for a chase involving well over $1 million.

“It’s a shocking amount of money that existed in late 2001 that does not exist today,” Scott said.

Scott said the principal balance on the cemetery’s perpetual care fund for plots and continuing maintenance stands at $160,000 and that its current operating cash is about $30,000. In testimony before chancery court in February, Scott said an account in Mississippi set up as an operating account for the holding company’s local property was used to send money elsewhere in the company’s multistate footprint, such as Alabama and South Carolina. No cemeteries were owned by the company in Texas, Scott said.

Several tax liens placed on the cemetery years ago are pending. Adding to more recent complications, Scott said, is the discovery of a $2.2 million deed of trust against the property filed in December 2003 by Ciena Capital LLC, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection during the height of the financial market collapse last September.

In good humor most of the night — at one point telling the mostly receptive crowd it “would help us out a lot if everybody stayed healthy” — Hosemann’s tone turned frank in response to a question concerning whether any refunds of pre-need fees paid by deed holders was possible.

“To be honest with you, there’s only $221 in the account. We’ve hit a stone wall with the lien being on the property itself,” Hosemann said.

Hosemann and Scott said they were cautiously optimistic the property held by deed holders would not be foreclosed on as those proceedings continue in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York. The goal of the inquiry, they said, remains to see the cemetery sold from the heirs of Mike Graham — deceased since 2007 — to a private entity willing to assume all the liabilities associated with the missing trust money.

Sharp said 50 percent discounts on opening and closing costs are available to anyone who has pre-paid. Further discounts are available on markers “if they buy from us,” Sharp said. New maintenance equipment has been purchased and core groundskeeping and clerical staff have been rehired, Sharp has said.

Installment fees, which have emerged as an issue with monument companies who have offered discounts of their own, serve the purpose of ensuring markers are properly installed without major realignment after the fact by the cemetery, Sharp said.

Maryland-based consumer advocate Carolyn Jacobi distributed fliers as some attendees left the courthouse. The handbills listed toll-free numbers for Brookhaven Monument Company, which owns Vicksburg Monument Company on Clay Street, and the Monument Builders of North America.

Jacobi characterized the fee as “a tortuous trampling of the ability to do business.”

Changes will take effect July 1 to the state’s Pre-Need Act. One will direct $10 from each contract be placed in the trust to build up a fund geared to protect the consumer against future reported abuses. Another will require those who sell pre-need contracts to be licensed by the state.

The office’s Business Regulation and Enforcement division oversees cemeteries’ pre-need trust accounts, which are mandated by state law to hold 85 percent of funds paid for pre-paid cemetery merchandise.

Heirs of Mike Graham have been contacted by Hosemann’s office during the course of the civil probe. Named as defendants are his daughter, Stephanie Graham, his widow, Linda Graham, Janice Tubbs — the employee identified in the state’s testimony as having oversight of the pre-need trust account at the time of the probe — and employees Yolanda Horne, Donald R. Hughes and A.M. Brewer, who managed several Graham-owned properties in Alabama.

Seven additional funeral industry firms in Mississippi were targeted for action by Hosemann’s office in the sweep. Corporate reporting violations alleged at Green Acres were the most serious individual case, in terms of the total of missing money documented.

In a somewhat similar case, former Southern Mortuary owner Mark Seepe of Jackson was sentenced Wednesday in Hinds County Circuit Court to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to six counts of criminal conversion, which is akin to embezzlement. He still faces similar charges in Rankin County.

Reviews of the Seepe business revealed at least $38,230 was confirmed missing from its trust funds, with poor record-keeping pushing the probable total much higher.

The Green Acres case has been handed over to the District Attorney’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office for possible criminal charges. 

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Contact Danny Barrett Jr. at dbarrett@vicksburgpost.com