Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Sometimes in reading just the big newspapers you miss a lot of interesting or curious stories.

The Florida Sentinel Bulletin is a Tampa based, smaller paper that caters to the various African American/Black communities. It has a very small town feel to it. There are shout-outs to people celebrating birthdays and other events. News stories with a different coverage than the big papers. Sometimes more to the story, sometimes a different perspective. There is a good opinion section providing the readers with a more broad based black perspective.

Occasionally you get interesting stories such as one last week regarding a burial gone bad, or so the family says.

The funeral and burial has resulted in accusations of mutilation and fraud since last year. On Wednesday, the two sisters assembled at Memorial Park Cemetery for exhumation of their father’s body. They accused funeral director Tebby Singleton of allegedly switching coffins and mutilating their father’s legs to fit into a smaller coffin.

They also claimed the body was not in the original burial site. However, cemetery owner John Robinson denied that the body had been relocated… On Wednesday, the coffin containing the body of George Bogan was opened to prove to the sisters that the body had not been mutilated.

The coffin measured 6′10″ in length. Mr. Bogan was 6′ 31/2″ tall his daughters said.

After opening the coffin, Singleton raised the pants legs to prove that the body had not been mutilated.

Ms. Karen Bogan said, “I do apologize, but this isn’t proving anything to me. He needs to come up out of the ground. The suit we buried him in was too small. His legs should have been exposed.”

“Both sisters contend that their father was buried near a tree in the cemetery. “It was hot that day and we were trying to stand under the tree for shade,” Ms. Harriet Bogan said.”

I wonder if there is more to the story, some bad blood perhaps over some other incident.

Unfortunately the paper does not archive its stories on line. So because this wasn’t published right away, the story has been replaced.

Other small area papers include La Gaceta, The Penny Saver (Sulphur Springs), USF Oracle, and The Loop (Lutz). There are more, such as Tampa Bay Sun,  but finding them online sometimes is a chore.

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