Jason Carr was a man who loved NASCAR, football, hunting, and dogs. When he died in a car crash in 2009, his widow wanted to honor his passions by plastering them on his headstone. His granite, couch-shaped grave marker was to sit in the cemetery of the St. Joseph Catholic Church in North Vernon, Indianapolis with a NASCAR logo on top for all to see — until a priest said "forget it."
According to this Associated Press story, widow Sharon Carr tried to get the headstone installed in 2010 after she paid $9,600 to have it made. The church's Rev. Jonathan Meyer refused on the grounds that it did not meet the cemetery's aesthetic standards.
So Carr filed a lawsuit, arguing that the clergy provided her with no regulations for the plot until after she tried to have it put up. As with most lawsuits, it's now become a case of he said, she said. From the story:
Meyer says in an affidavit that photographs of the monument were shown to the St. Joseph Parish Council six weeks before Carr purchased it and that the council determined the monument wasn't acceptable because of its secular nature. He said he informed Carr of the decision.
"They told her not to move forward with the purchasing of the monument, but she went ahead anyway," Meyer said. "We have consistently communicated the same message prior to the purchase and after the purchase. We did not think a granite couch was an appropriate monument in our historic cemetery."
The priest did add the rules weren't "formalized" until after Carr bought the headstone, but that they were "known before that" and that they have had various regulations since 1907.
It will be interesting to see who prevails in this case. All I know is that it's baller as hell that someone loved NASCAR enough to convince his wife that its logo would look great on a headstone.
When I go out, I kind of want a Viper or an E30 M3 or something else that's obscenely awesome on my headstone now too. Maybe the Jalopnik logo.
Photo credit The Republic