A West Virginia gravedigger was apprehended after he reportedly accidentally dug up the grave of an infant while attempting to dig a different plot, proceeding to throw the child's clothes and casket over a hill while leaving the body above ground.
Matthew Fortner, 49, who works at the Baylous Cemetery in Salt Rock, was arrested on Wednesday for digging up the grave of an infant boy who died at just a few days old.
"We were here decorating graves for Easter," says a female caller in a 911 call obtained by WSAZ.
"It's like someone dug a grave up and there's a baby," a man says. "The casket's thrown over a hill."
Fortner was arrested and charged with the displacement of a dead body and intentionally withholding information about the disturbance of "human, skeletal remains."
"This is not what I expected to find," the female caller said, per WSAZ.
"We found baby clothes," the woman added.
Responders from the Cabell County Sheriff's Office were shaken by what they found at the scene. Cabell County Sheriff Doug Adams stated that they worked relentlessly to figure out who had desecrated the child's grave.
"It's bothered them and weighed on everyone's minds," Adams said.
"We scoured that entire cemetery," Adams continued. "Looking to see if there were any graves that had been disturbed and we couldn't find any. So [we were] wondering if that child was buried in that cemetery or if it was brought from somewhere else."
The child was buried in the cemetery in 1982 right beside an empty plot Fortner had been preparing for a separate burial, digging it up. He has been criticized for breaking the child's casket and leaving the child's body above ground instead of choosing to rebury him.
"It takes a sick individual, in my opinion, to desecrate a grave and mess with a corpse, period," Adams said.
