Paula Tin Nyo sobbed as three men dug shovels into the cemetery ground where she’d buried a vault with her 20-year-old son’s keepsakes, baby teeth and umbilical cord, along with some of his ashes.

She had buried them there four years ago not knowing the funeral company had sold her a gravesite that already belonged to someone else. Now, after a lengthy court case, a judge had ordered the vault removed.

The plot her daughter had picked out, beneath a cedar tree with a view of the sunset, in fact belonged to Jane and Martin Reser, the court found.

They, too, had lost a son. Alex Reser, 30, was already buried just 20 feet away. The Resers planned to put a tribute bench for their son in the same place Tin Nyo had put one for her son, Tyber Harrison.

So on Tuesday, at the Skyline Memorial Gardens in Portland’s west hills, about 30 people gathered to observe the disinterment. Tin Nyo placed sunflowers on her son’s grave marker, read him a poem and knelt down with both hands on the marker to tell her son she was sorry.

Then she stepped aside between her husband and younger son. Family and friends encircled them as the grave marker etched with Harrison’s name was uprooted. The basalt rock slab they’d fashioned into a tribute for the avid climber was strapped to a bulldozer and hauled away.

“The one little thing I wanted,” Tin Nyo said between sobs.

The disinterment followed a long-running dispute between Tin Nyo, the Resers and the $10 billion funeral company Service Corporation International. After helping Tin Nyo perform a burial ceremony for the vault, the company sued her to reclaim the plot on behalf of the Resers.

The Reser family hasn’t commented on the case, and initially sought to remain anonymous in the trial, as Willamette Week reported in 2024. Jane and Martin Reser are part of the family that owns Reser’s Fine Foods and whose name is on Oregon State University’s football stadium. OPB attempted to contact them through their attorneys on the case, Reser’s Fine Foods, the Reser Family Foundation and phone numbers and email addresses associated with Jane Reser.

The dispute has raised the question of how a company should remedy its mistake when it has made competing promises to grieving families. It is one that raises the question of what constitutes a grave site, pitting Tin Nyo’s belief in the sanctity of her family’s memorial against the fine print of her contract and laws governing cemeteries.

“It’s not a wholly unprecedented case, but it is fairly rare,” said Tanya Marsh, a law professor at Wake Forest University and author of The Law of Human Remains. She said disputes over burial sites have happened before, and have resulted in entire bodies being disinterred.

In court filings seeking to preserve the family’s anonymity, attorneys wrote the Resers “have no desire for media attention or publicity, especially as they relate to the subjects implicated by this litigation.” They said the family was grieving and took issue with earlier assertions from Tin Nyo that the burial plot was “just a transaction” to them.

A spokesperson for Service Corporation International did not return a call requesting comment. In court, the company’s attorneys have stated that it offered both the Resers and Tin Nyo alternative sites at no cost. Heather St. Clair, the company’s attorney, was present at the disinterment and declined further comment.

“They took accountability for that mistake, they apologized for it, they offered every remedy available for it under the law and the contract,” St.Clair told the jury during closing arguments on Dec. 19, according to The Oregonian. “We’re asking you to look at facts over feelings.”

The dispute over who owned the burial plot was simple, Marsh said: In almost all cases the first buyer (the Reser family) has the right. But the question of whether the plot legally contained Harrison’s gravesite, and what that means for Tin Nyo seeking damages, is more complicated.

Most laws regarding cemeteries were written at a time when they only applied to whole bodies buried in caskets. Cremation, however, has become substantially more common, Marsh said, leading to disputes over cremated remains that existing laws are ill-equipped to handle.

A key argument in the lawsuit was over whether the remains of Tin Nyo’s son were actually present at the burial site, and if she had breached her contract with the cemetery by putting them there. Skyline said it had no record of ashes being buried there and that Tin Nyo told them the vault would contain only keepsakes. Tin Nyo and her family say they are still in possession of most of Harrison’s ashes, but that some of them were sprinkled in with a book of watercolors and poetry she made for her son and placed in the vault.

“Human behavior — that is, the things that we are doing in cemeteries — have in some ways outpaced the law,” Marsh said. “Who are we to judge what a grieving mother needs?”

After Skyline sued Tin Nyo, she filed a counterclaim for $17 million. A civil jury in the case decided that, while Skyline was negligent, Tin Nyo had waived her contractual right to sue and awarded her no damages. The jury found that Tin Nyo did not prove that Skyline’s negligence had caused her emotional distress.

“Yeah. I’m angry. How can I not be?” Tin Nyo said in an interview the day before the disinterment. “It is about my son, but, frankly, it’s about me and my dignity and what I hold sacred and having that just be discarded.”

It took Tin Nyo and her surviving children five years to agree on the right spot to put Tyber’s memorial. It had only been there for four.

“Everything was picked out. The cedar tree was picked out. The vault was picked out. Everything we put in it was picked out,” she said. “They’re just mocking what we hold sacred, and I just hate it so much. ”

After the disinterment, Tin Nyo and her husband, David Williams, said they will keep the grave marker and vault at their house for now. Their attorney, Gracie Nagle, is temporarily storing the stone bench.

They don’t know where they’ll put them next. They said it won’t be at Skyline.

Two grieving mothers

Tyber Harrison died on March 4, 2016, after being struck by a truck in Miami, Florida.

Tin Nyo and her children held a small ceremony in Florida at his cremation, then drove to the West Coast, seeking peace with a change of scenery. She landed in west Portland. Years passed without them knowing the right place to memorialize Harrison. She considered scattering his ashes at sea. His younger brother wanted to take some with him to all the cliffs and mountains they’d planned to climb together.

But as Tin Nyo would go for daily runs through Skyline cemetery, she noticed the beautiful views, and groups of teenagers that reminded her of Harrison and his friends.

“He can be amongst this,” she recalled thinking. “This is more than just death. There’s life here still.”

Alex Reser died exactly three years later, March 4, 2019, of a fentanyl overdose. He was a talented wrestler, his family told news outlets at the time, who got addicted to opioids because of a back injury.

A drug dealer was later arrested and convicted for selling the counterfeit oxycodone pills, made of fentanyl, that caused Reser’s overdose.

“We were hoping for justice because our son Alex is not coming back,” Mary Reser, his father, told the judge at the sentencing hearing for his fentanyl dealer, Trueblood. “No one will ever again have the opportunity to spend time, create more memories with Alex.”

Later that year, Martin and Jane Reser purchased a family plot at Skyline Memorial Gardens.

Their son’s grave is marked with a marble headstone and a plaque with his image engraved on it, along with the words “Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day.”

They also reserved a space beneath a nearby tree for a memorial bench. Then in December 2021, according to court documents, Jane Reser was visiting her son’s grave when she noticed a new marker and bench — Tin Nyo’s — had been placed in the space they’d bought.

Skyline indemnified

Upon learning of the duplicate sale, Skyline asked the Resers if they would consider a substitute site. They toured and considered other options, according to court documents, but “after about a month decided they wanted to keep the space they owned since none of the alternatives were closer to their son’s burial space.”

One of the substitute sites offered to both families was under the same cedar tree, a few feet away on the opposite side of it. Both rejected it.

In court filings, Tin Nyo said Skyline told her that once the Resers made their decision, it intended to move her son’s plot and that she could pick a new site or the company would pick one for her.

Attorneys for Skyline argued it could move Harrison’s vault and marker, and was indemnified in doing so, because Tin Nyo had given consent “by signing documents permitting Skyline to move her items to remedy errors in placement.” The company’s attorneys also said state law indemnified it since any ashes placed in the vault were done so without its knowledge.

Tin Nyo alleged Skyline started to address the duplicate site problem with the Resers in 2021 but waited nearly a year to mention it to her.

Tin Nyo’s attorneys alleged that Skyline planned to sue her and dig up her son’s vault even as she checked in about when the company planned to install the flower vase she ordered, telling her it was happening soon. They also claimed the company was planning to take action against Tin Nyo even as Tin Nyo hired them to handle her mother’s cremation.

According to interviews with Tin Nyo and documents her attorneys filed in court, she offered to share the site and make room for two benches.

The offer was made through attorneys. The two mothers have not spoken.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/30/skylne-memorial-gardens-cemetery-plot-burial/