Man Faces Charges for Digging Up Grandmother’s Corpse in Berkeley

Zebulun Nash, 73, is charged with attempting to deface or destroy property of the troubled Washington Park Cemetery

Nov 9, 2023 at 8:27 am

Volunteers have sounded the alarm about current conditions at Washington Park Cemetery.

A Houston man with roots in Missouri is facing a criminal charge related to his attempt to dig up his grandmother’s grave at a long-neglected cemetery in Berkeley.

That charge, filed by county prosecutors yesterday, stems from this past August when a police officer responded to the Washington Park Cemetery to find 73-year-old Zebulun Nash “covered in dirt” and talking on a cell phone, police say. Another man was busy nearby throwing dirt from a gravesite.

The officer who came upon the two men was none other than Eddie Boyd, who has been featured in the pages of the RFT and other outlets.

Nash told Boyd that he and the other man were digging up Nash’s grandmother’s corpse to relocate it, an endeavor the two men had been at “for the past few days,” according to the police probable cause statement. The other man said that he and Nash had mostly completed the digging. Neither man had permission to dig up a corpse.

The charge of attempting to destroy or deface cemetery property that Nash is now facing is a misdemeanor. It’s unclear why more than two two months lapsed between the incident and the charge being filed.

The Nash featured in yesterday’s criminal complaint appears to be the same Zebulun Nash who once sat on the board of trustees of the University of Missouri S&T. A 1972 graduate of the school, Nash then served in the Peace Corps in Kenya in his 20s and then went on to have a long career at Exxon Mobile in Texas. He established multiple scholarships to support students interested in studying chemical engineering at his alma mater.

The RFT called numerous numbers associated with Nash hoping to inquire as to what he was doing in the cemetery that led to the charges. We will update the story when we hear back.

Concerns have grown in recent years about the state of Washington Park Cemetery, which was once the largest Black cemetery in St. Louis but has since fallen into a state of severe neglect. Volunteers have sounded the alarm about current conditions, and some have complained about it being in such a state of disrepair that they’d like to move their loved ones. But, they say, the cemetery owner does not respond to their entreaties.