Pittsburg, PA
Baby’s body missing from Pittsburgh-area gravesite after burial 20 years ago
After 20 years of pain and torture, a Beaver County mother now has proof that her baby girl was not buried where her headstone sits in West Mifflin.
Christine Berezanich has never recovered from the death of her 2-month-old daughter, Italia Laird.
“I loved her with every being in my body,” she said. “She was a very beautiful girl.”
What happened after Italia died in 2005 from sudden infant death syndrome hasn’t made it any easier.
“I would still go to the grave every year,” Berezanich said. “I would still mourn her. I would take her flowers. I was talking to a ground that had no body.”
The area where she remembers burying Italia is 25 feet from where the monument company put her headstone.
“I called there and she said she’d get back to me,” Berezanich said. “She never called me. I felt betrayed by the church and by the company.”
For years, the monument company and the association that currently manages Holy Name Cemetery in West Mifflin have insisted the gravestone was placed where Italia was buried, Berezanich said. Once the church closed a few years after Italia was buried, the Catholic Parish Charities Association, part of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, took over.
The change in management created challenges as the association cited records that it did not create itself.
Berezanich found errors in the original church cemetery records, which show her 2-month-old daughter as having been born in 1904. Cemetery officials have since admitted to her that the pastor who managed the church was in the early stages of dementia.
“I would look down there, and I would see the ground, and it would just anger me to the point I quit going,” she said.
She returned to the cemetery on Wednesday as the plot with the headstone was dug up with the help of a local funeral director.
“He came over and said that the ground looked like it was undisturbed, like nobody ever dug the ground up,” Berezanich said.
KDKA’s Ricky Sayer asked, “What are you feeling in your heart when you hear that?”
“I told you so, and pain and anger,” Berezanich said. “I was very angry. As I was walking away, I screamed as loud as I could to get the frustration out. How do you lose a baby? I didn’t lose this child once. I lost her twice, and no parent should ever have to feel that loss.”
Probing is already underway to find the real location of Italia. Catholic Parish Cemeteries Association Regional Cemetery Coordinator Heidi Masterson provided KDKA-TV a brief statement:
“I am doing everything I can and so is the operations team of the cemetery to find where baby Italia was buried in 2005 before we owned and operated the establishment,” Masterson said.
For now, Berezanich’s pain and torture remain.
Last year, Americans received nearly 30 billion scam robocalls and text messages. Now, leaders in Pennsylvania are taking a new approach to try to crack down on them.
“It’s not just certain audiences that are targeted in this space. It’s really everybody,” said Kate Sullivan, CEO of Better Business Bureau of Western Pennsylvania. “Robocalling is just faster and more aggressive than it’s ever been,” Sullivan said.
The prevalence, exacerbated by artificial intelligence, is why 49 attorneys general across the country sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission to strengthen its rules to prevent scammers from accessing legitimate phone numbers.
“You have individuals that will purchase maybe 100,000 different phone numbers,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said. “Those numbers will land somewhere where you have a nefarious actor who will use those numbers to do the robocalls.”
Sunday is part of the Anti-Robocall Task Force, along with West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey. Last year, the coalition sent warning letters to major phone service providers to stop allowing illegal robocalls to reach consumers. Now they’re building on this by going directly to the FCC.
“The consumer matters, and we want to make sure that our constituents, the consumers that are in our states’ voices, are being heard at the highest level as loudly as they can be,” McCuskey said.
Sunday said they want to put more onus on companies to not sell these numbers, and if they do, to have documentation that can be provided to law enforcement so they can trace back and hold the scammers accountable.
KDKA-TV reached out to the FCC for comment. A spokesperson said in part that they “welcome this input from state leaders.” They also mentioned, “The Commission proposed expanding certification and disclosure requirements to all providers that receive telephone numbering resources… to stop scammers from exploiting gaps in the system.”
“Getting ahead of it and more protections for the consumers, I think, does have quite a bit of value,” Sullivan said.
As for what you can do, the BBB and AGs said it’s better to let a robocall go to voicemail. If you decline it, that indicates you’re a real person and may get more calls. Also, make sure to report robocalls to the BBB or the Federal Trade Commission.
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