it was reported on local news that the Escambia County Sheriffs Office was called to investigate a crime of corpse abuse by an employee who was caught in the act, by another employee. The alleged criminal was never charged with the crime because he committed suicide the same day. The investigation into the crime and the Oaklawn Funeral Home is still under pending. In 2001, it was reported that employees of the Memorial Gardens cemetery near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had oversold the cemetery, so bodies were buried in the wrong places, separating husbands from wives; vaults were cracked open by a backhoe, bodies were exhumed, with bones, skulls and shrouds thrown into nearby woods, bodies were stacked on top of each other, and remains were relocated without notifying relatives. The allegations were particularly appalling to the Jewish cemetery's more religiously observant customers, The Miami Herald reported. Traditional Jewish law requires bodies to be buried intact and prohibits disturbing the dead. SCI reached a agreement with the Florida attorney general's office in 2003 that required it to repair plots and reorganize the cemeteries to ensure all graves were properly marked and the grounds could accommodate all plots sold. SCI also settled a separate class-action lawsuit on behalf of 350 families for . Virginia On , The Washington Post reported that an SCI cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia, had improperly buried the remains of the stillborn daughter of Nsombi Hale in a grave too shallow (in a grave about deep). Nsombi Hale was filing suit against SCI. After an internal investigation by SCI, attorneys working for SCI denied the charges against the company in a letter to Virginia funeral regulators, and a few days later, the Post reported that Robert Ranghelli, one of the SCI employees who had corroborated the initial reports of improper handing of corpses, was fired for "exercising his first amendment rights/speaking with the media" after having been on administrative leave for several months following the initial reports in the newspaper. On , The Washington Post reported that the National Funeral Home, a facility owned by SCI in the Falls Church area of Fairfax County, Virginia, which also acts as a centralized embalming and dressing station for embalming and body preparation for other nearby SCI-owned operations (Arlington Funeral Home, Danzansky-Goldberg Memorial Chapel, and Demaine Funeral Home), was storing naked bodies in various stages of decomposition in conditions described as "disgusting,