Family fighting church to change typo on headstone
The family of a Rio Vista woman was horrified when they saw a glaring typo on their loved one's headstone.
Carol Prelesnik was a good wife, mother and grandmother. Her family says she was a good Catholic woman who lived an honest life. So when Prelesnik died from lung cancer, her family wanted nothing but the best for her burial at Saint Joseph's Cemetery.
"She was very caring. She was always there for me," daughter Ann Sanchez said.
When the family went to pay their respects three months after Prelesnik's burial and saw the headstone for the first time, they noticed the spelling mistake.
"It has her name, the day she was born, the day she died. Then it says 'resting pacefully.' It should say 'resting peacefully,'" Sanchez said.
In the five months since, Sanchez says she has tried to get the spelling mistake corrected but her family has run into a wall.
The cemetery is run by the Sacramento Diocese and all changes to plots must go through them, but several phone calls pleading for something says to be done have gone nowhere, according to Sanchez.
"Two times, she had told me it had already been done, that it had been corrected and both times I drove down to Rio Vista, saw that it hadn't been done and immediately called her. I have gotten a lot of excuses but no action and it just feels like it's not ever going to be fixed," Sanchez said.
The anniversary of Prelesnik's death is coming up on July 27, and Sanchez wants something done now.
"I feel like when I go to the cemetery and when my family goes to the cemetery, we are not going to pay our respects. We are going to check on a spelling error and it just doesn't seem like the right situation," she said.
A statement came out late Tuesday from the spokesperson from the Catholic Cemeteries of Sacramento:
"We owe the Prelesnik family an apology. We didn't do enough to follow-up on their concerns and relied on paperwork from the company in Southern California that was responsible for the repairs the family rightly asked for. The inscription company told us the work was done, but it wasn't done properly and we failed to double-check.
"We have been in touch with the inscription company and the work will be done on March 30."
"The bottom line is that this should not have happened and we take full responsibility. We sincerely apologize to the family and will be in touch with them to personally discuss the situation."
