The family of a sheriff's deputy in Louisiana was told their loved one could not be buried at the cemetery near Oberlin because he was Black.
The Allen Parrish deputy, Darrell Semien, died Sunday. Semien's widow, Karla Semien, of Oberlin, told CBS Lafayette, Louisiana affiliate KLFY-TV, "It was just so much a slap in the face, a punch in the gut. It was just belittling him. You know, that we can't bury him because he's black."
According to CBS News, Semien and her family met with the woman who sold plots. Initially, it just her and her white son, and everything seemed okay, but when her Black relatives got out of the car to meet with the woman things changed.
"First me and one of my other sons got out of the car when she drove up, and he's white, and she said she was sorry for our loss, and I told her, 'Thank you.' And before I could say anything else, the rest of them started coming out of the car, and she looked at them, and then she looked at me and says, 'We're going to have to have a discrepancy.' She said, 'We're not going to be able to sell you a plot.'"
By Thursday, the cemetery's board held an emergency meeting and swiftly removed a whites-only provision from its sales contracts.
"When that meeting was over it was like a weight lifted off of me," H. Creig Vizena, board president for Oaklin Springs Cemetery in southwest Louisiana said, according to CBS. "I apologized and I'm still apologizing. … I am so sorry that this happened," Vizena stressed to KLFY.
The contract is signed by everyone who buys a plot in the cemetery, but the board members claim they never noticed the wording "the right of burial of the remains of white human beings” in the contract.
"I'm sorry I have no better explanation for it than that," Vizena said, adding, "I can't answer a question that I don't know the answer to. I refuse to speculate on it. I just know that it was wrong and now it's right."
"To be told this is like we were nothing. He was nothing? He put his life on the line for them," Semien remarked to KPLC-TV on Wednesday.
"My dad wasn't any man, he was a phenomenal man," daughter Shayla Semien told KATC-TV. "He was a police officer in this same community for 15 years. He was denied a place to lay because of the color of his skin."
The woman who refused to sell the Semien's a plot has been relieved of her duties at the cemetery.
CBS News contributed to this story.