Almost two weeks after the trial began for Terrence and Keith Nicks, brothers accused of dismembering and removing bodies in a cemetery scheme to resell burial plots, the defense put Keith Nicks on the stand for the first time Tuesday.
Nicks, the former superintendent of the historic Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, told the jury he had no part in removing gravestones and desecrating human remains at the burial ground. He also said he advised convicted cemetery manager Carolyn Towns of problems as soon as he arrived in 2005.
"I told her we got graves where we shouldn't have graves," Nicks said. "We would go to dig a grave and there would already be someone there."
Nicks and his brother Terrence, the cemetary's dump truck driver and alleged lookout, are accused of scooping remains of bodies from their plots and coffins and dumping them into overgrown lots to resell burial plots between 2003 and 2009.
Nicks said he followed the cemetery's rules and only allowed double-stacked burials when the the families of the deceased agreed to it.
He also admitted that Burr Oak did occasionally see human remains on the grounds, but he chalked it up to groundhogs.
Nicks blamed three of the witnesses who testified against him for the serious problem of human remains scattered around the cemetery. He said one of them in particular was a "wild man" who retaliated against him because Nicks tried to get him fired.
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Early in the trial, Willie Esper Jr., a Burr Oak cemetery worker, testified that Nicks used a sledgehammer to destroy a cement liner surrounding an old casket and once heard him use an expletive to describe the skeletal remains he wanted to trash to make room for a fresh corpse.
Esper said he found what he assumed was a human rib cage on the grounds of the cemetery just days after he started his job as a seasonal landscaper. He later said he also saw a shin bone jutting out of the mud and witnessed his co-workers push their tools so deep into the soil that he spotted deteriorating bodies floating in water-filled coffins.
David Lowery Jr., a former president of the south suburban chapter of the NAACP, defended Nicks in court.
"A lot of the stuff was out there even before Mr. Nicks was hired," Lowery said. "His mission was to bring this cemetery up to a state where it would be acceptable."
Under cross examination, Nicks admitted that while he had complained to his superiors about conditions at Burr Oak, he never went to the authorities.
