>
Article snippet: SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. — Families have buried their dead, one by one, in the cemetery on the edge of town since the 1850s, when a settler named Dr. John Sutherland put down stakes on an old Spanish land grant. Since then the graveyard has endured for generations as a resting place for pioneers and cowboys, matriarchs and masons, overdose victims and those who passed away silently in their sleep. But the cemetery’s caretakers never before faced the colossal dilemma they do now: How to bury so many people in such a short span of time. So Lynda Ragen, the owner of Vinyard Funeral Home, is talking to a Dallas company about borrowing additional hearses. Joe Garza, a local resident, is donating concrete liners for burial vaults. Audrey Louis, the district attorney, is rushing to provide money for funeral expenses from a compensation fund for crime victims. And Bertha Cardenas-Lomas, the head of the town’s cemetery board, has been sorting out the onslaught of funerals so that not everyone is buried at once. She has also been busy mowing the grass at the grave sites. “This feels like a terrifying, crushing nightmare except that I’m somehow awake,” said Ms. Cardenas-Lomas, 57. In the span of a year, Ms. Cardenas-Lomas said, the cemetery normally handles fewer than 15 burials, far fewer than the graves that need to be dug in the coming days after a gunman killed 26 at the First Baptist Church in one of the worst mass shootings in the history of the United States. With th... Link to the full article to read more