Mom Watches Son’s Grave Dug Up After Cemetery’s Cruel Mistake

A grieving mother was forced to watch workers unearth her son’s memorial vault after a funeral home sold his burial plot twice — and a jury ruled her suffering wasn’t “severe” enough for compensation.

THE DOUBLE-BOOKED GRAVE

Sometimes the cruelest moments don’t come from malice — they come from paperwork. From a database entry, a clerical oversight, a sale completed without checking the records. And sometimes the fallout from that simple mistake spirals into years of litigation, a courtroom battle between a grieving mother and a billion-dollar corporation, and ultimately, the unthinkable: watching your child’s grave be dug up while you beg them to stop.

A KNOCK AT THE DOOR IN FLORIDA

On March 4, 2016, around 12:30 in the morning, a truck struck a young man walking near a highway in Orlando, Florida. He was 20 years old. He’d celebrated his birthday just a few weeks earlier.

Tyber Newland Harrison was a Bright Futures scholar at the University of Central Florida, where he studied physics and psychology. He had worked since he was 16 — as a videographer, then a real estate agent and marketing associate. He trained in jiu jitsu and boxing, practiced alpine rock climbing, loved snowboarding. His obituary describes a life that ended with “a moment of violence” after beginning “peacefully in a private homebirth in Delray Beach, Florida on February 20, 1996.”

Later that day, police knocked on the door of his mother’s Florida home. Paula Tin Nyo, a native of Myanmar whose family had fled the country for political reasons when she was six years old, assumed the officers had come about her dog barking or one of her four children getting into some minor trouble. Instead, they escorted her to her kitchen table.

She recalled slumping to the floor when they told her. She later said she kept thinking about those moments between when Tyber was hit and when he died.

FLEEING TOWARD A FINAL RESTING PLACE

Tin Nyo has described herself as someone who’s “good at fleeing.” She’s lived in five countries and dozens of homes across her lifetime. After losing her son, she wanted to get as far from Florida as possible. She packed up her children and Tyber’s ashes, and they ended up in Portland, Oregon.

Five years passed before Tin Nyo found what she felt was the right place to lay her son to rest: Skyline Memorial Gardens, perched on a spine of the West Hills some 1,100 feet above Portland. The plot offered a panoramic view to the southwest. Records show she paid $16,511 for it.

In October 2021, friends and family traveled from across the country to witness the burial of a memorial vault. Inside were mementos from Tyber’s 20 years of life — baby teeth, hair, a bracelet, and some of his ashes, which Tin Nyo had used to create a watercolor painting. She placed a basalt column from Smith Rock, a famous climbing destination, beside the grave to serve as a bench. An expansive cedar tree provided shade.

THE LETTER ARRIVES

Less than a year later, in September 2022, Skyline Memorial Gardens notified Tin Nyo of a problem. The cemetery had discovered that the same plot had already been sold to another family — two years before Tin Nyo bought it.

The first buyers, Martin and Jane Reser, had purchased the plot in June 2019 for their son Alex, who had died that March. The dates held a grim symmetry: Alex Reser died on March 4, 2019 — exactly three years to the day after Tyber Harrison was killed.

Alex Reser was 30 years old. He had wrestled at Oregon State University, became a certified public accountant, and worked as a manager at Moss Adams, a major accounting firm. According to court testimony, he had developed an opioid addiction after injuring his back while wrestling, and that addiction eventually led to a fatal fentanyl overdose. His grave marker, located just 20 feet from where Tyber Harrison’s vault had been placed, bears a tribute to his late grandfather, Al Reser.

The Reser family is one of Oregon’s most prominent. Reser’s Fine Foods, based in Beaverton, was founded in 1950 when Mildred Reser started making potato salad in her farmhouse kitchen. By 2025, the company reported $2 billion in annual revenue and employed over 5,000 people across 14 facilities. Oregon State University’s football stadium is named Reser Stadium after the family’s donations, and the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton also carries their name.

Skyline Memorial Gardens proposed a solution: move Tyber Harrison’s remains to another plot.

A MOTHER REFUSES

Skyline’s general manager summoned Tin Nyo to a meeting and asked her to sign papers agreeing to the relocation. According to Tin Nyo, she asked the manager if she had children. The manager said yes.

Tin Nyo pushed the papers back across the table. She reportedly told the manager that she couldn’t believe one mother would ask another to move her son’s grave.

She then sent a series of handwritten cease-and-desist letters to Skyline and its parent company, Service Corporation International — a Houston-based funeral industry giant that operates more than 1,900 locations and generates over $4 billion in annual revenue.

In May 2023, Skyline filed a lawsuit seeking a court order to remove Harrison’s remains. One of Portland’s leading law firms, Tonkon Torp, agreed to represent Tin Nyo at no charge.

THE LEGAL BATTLE

The lawsuit grew complicated. Skyline admitted it had made the error but argued it was obligated to honor the first sale. Court documents revealed that Skyline had offered to refund Tin Nyo’s $16,000 payment and rebury the vault just a few feet away, but she did not respond to the offer.

Tin Nyo filed a counterclaim seeking up to $17 million in damages.

Skyline’s attorneys — and attorneys representing the family that wanted the plot — fought to keep the Reser name out of court records. They succeeded initially, with the Resers identified only as “John Smith and Jayne Smith” in filings. Judge Christopher Ramras ruled in May 2024 that anonymity helped “preserve privacy in a sensitive and highly personal” case, though he noted he was open to revisiting the question.

The anonymity didn’t last. Court filings inadvertently revealed the identity of the original buyers when attorneys included correspondence that specifically named Martin and Jane Reser.

According to court documents, the Reser family did not want to participate in the litigation and stated they were ordered to join it against their wishes.

Tonkon Torp attorney Gracey Nagle argued that the insistence on anonymity had made it difficult to obtain documents through normal legal discovery. She also noted that her client felt diminished by the different treatment — one family’s privacy was being protected by the court while her family’s tragedy was laid bare.

THE JURY’S VERDICT

In early December 2024, a Multnomah County judge ruled that Skyline had indeed double-booked the site and sided with the funeral home’s request to return the plot to the Reser family.

Then came a second proceeding. On December 22, 2024, a civil jury found that while Skyline was negligent for the double-booking, the company had not inflicted “severe emotional distress” on Tin Nyo. A key factor in their decision: court records showed that Tin Nyo had breached her original contract by adding cremains to the vault. The contract had only permitted mementos, not human ashes.

Tin Nyo’s attorneys had argued that only a small amount of ashes were placed in the vault — the portion she had used in the watercolor painting — and that the disinterment itself would cause severe emotional distress regardless of any technicality.

The jury disagreed.

THE UNBURYING

On Tuesday, December 30, 2025, workers from Skyline Memorial Gardens arrived at the plot on the West Hills overlooking Portland. Friends and family of Tyber Harrison gathered around what was supposed to have been his final resting place.

Paula Tin Nyo begged them to stop as they dug up the vault containing her son’s baby teeth, his hair, his ashes mixed into a watercolor she had painted.

They did not stop.

Tin Nyo’s husband, David Williams, spoke to reporters afterward with tears on his face. He said his wife and her children would have to process this grief all over again. He described the situation as “unfathomable” — someone feeling so entitled to a piece of property that they would demand it even when someone else’s son was already in the ground.

He said the jury had decided she wouldn’t suffer from watching this happen, and he couldn’t imagine anyone thinking that.

Skyline Memorial Park released a single statement: “Out of respect for the privacy of those we are honored to serve, we will not be commenting on this matter.”

The Reser family did not respond to requests for comment.

As of early January 2026, Tin Nyo has refused the offer to have her son’s memorial vault reinterred in a different plot at the same cemetery. The vault, along with the basalt bench from Smith Rock and the headstone, have all been removed from Skyline Memorial Gardens.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

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