Monumental disputes: Grand Island company accused of theft

It was dusk. She directed her headlights toward her husband’s burial place, where a headstone was installed 86 days prior.

“There’s this gaping hole … I thought I was losing it,” Matzner remembered. “I just flung open the gate and ran over there. I just kept saying, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it.’

“And I took a picture.”

Matzner purchased the headstone from Monument Advisors of Grand Island.

Other customers include Michelle Tatro of Hastings and her husband, David, who purchased a stone on Feb. 24, 2021 from the company for their two-year-old son, Ryker. Ryker’s parents were very intentional in selecting their stone.

They told Kelli Lepler, owner of Monument Advisors, they wanted Ryker’s stone to match David’s 15-year-old sister’s headstone. A black granite star on the marker would be a special order, the Tatros were told.

“It took me a while to save up,” Michelle Tatro said, adding: “We had never bought a headstone before.”

“(Funeral businesses) handled us very delicately, compassionately, up until that process,” Tatro said of the time following Ryker’s death. “So we really trusted her from the beginning.”

After months without contact, the Tatros heard from Monument Advisors on April 7, 2022, Tatro said. She said the couple had no idea the stone hadn’t been ordered until that conversation.

“(Lepler) kept telling us the remainder had to be paid before it could be set,” Michelle Tatro said.

In May 2022, the stone was paid in full, but Ryker Dean Tatro, who died Dec. 3, 2020, still rests in an unmarked grave.

There’s been plenty said lately about Monument Advisors online – much of it accusing the company of lengthy delays on monument orders or monuments not arriving at all. The Independent reached out to Monument Advisors via phone and Facebook Messenger, but did not receive a response in time for publication. This story will be updated if company officials respond. The monument company is located at 2545 W. Old Potash Highway.

Tatro started the Facebook group “Beware Monument Advisors Has Bad Communication,” 22 weeks ago, according to the page’s information section. There are 232 members. To be sure, not all have done business with Monument Advisors, but those who have are vocal.

Monument Advisors has resources on its website discussing supply chain issues in the monument industry. Lepler also mentioned supply chain issues to Tatro. The Independent reached out to Monument Advisors’s supplier, Rock of Ages in Graniteville, Vermont, for more information. Rock of Ages representatives did not return messages left by a reporter in time for publication of this story.

Tatro said Lepler was upset Tatro aired her complaints on Facebook.

“After she told me FB wasn’t the route to go and I’d have no results … I promised her I’d tell everyone about my experience until I myself need a headstone,” Tatro said in a Saturday, April 8, post.

The Independent published an article about Kelli Lepler’s purchase of Monument Advisors from her father, Alan, in November 2020. The company celebrated its 10th anniversary with an open house in the summer of 2021.

Matzner asked the company to repair and put the headstone back up. She wanted their assistance in rectifying the situation. At first, Lepler seemed concerned about her customer, Matzner said, but not long. On Christmas Eve, the day after Matzner discovered her husband’s headstone had fallen, Lepler arrived at the McCool cemetery.

“She had done a 180, overnight,” Matzner said. “She was saying vandalism.”

A winter storm raging through the area a few weeks before the monument’s placement was also blamed. From there, sometimes Matzner heard long periods of nothing.

She was hesitant to disclose how much she paid for the headstone for her husband – a firefighter who suddenly died of a heart attack April 26, 2019 at the age of 60. According to his obituary, he was a captain on the York Fire Department and member of the International Association of Firefighters Union #1648. He was also a member of the McCool Junction Volunteer Fire Department.

“People are gonna say, ‘Well, that’s what she gets for putting something that big out there,’” Matzner said of her purchase. “I was trying to do a good thing.”

The good thing she did for her late husband cost about $20,000, Matzner said, paid up front with a check.

Matzner said she filed an insurance claim after the headstone fell and the company divorced itself from the matter, The situation eventually ended up in court. The parties reached a settlement.

“After that was all said and done, the cash out was for less than half of what I paid,” Matzner said. “This whole thing has just, it has almost broken me inside, changed my personality … like I’m scared of stuff. I never used to be scared of anything.”

While looking into Monument Advisors reputation – and adding her own reviews – Tatro learned of other Monument Advisors clients.

“I really wanted to connect with them, so I made the group,” Tatro said. “That’s how all that started.”

Matzner said until she came across the Facebook group, she had “no idea others were out there.”

Since last week, numerous reports of theft against a business with Monument Advisors’s address have been brought to Grand Island Police Department.

“At this point, there should be a pile of money,” Tatro said.

Tatro, among others, has filed complaints with the Nebraska Attorney General’s office, she said. The Tatros also filed a report with Grand Island Police Department on April 6, alleging a theft amounting to $7,840.

By Tuesday, April 11, police had received nine complaints, said GIPD Captain Jim Duering.

“I feel really bad for all these other folks that are filing police reports,” Matzner said. “They’ve gotten nothing. They’ve paid thousands of dollars and have no stones.”

Determining whether each of the complaints are criminal or civil will take time, Duering said.

“We’ll do an investigation that will involve interviews, tracking of money and probably looking at shipping and bank records. It’ll probably take us some time to determine that.”

“There’s no real police story until we have time to do our piece of it to determine whether it’s criminal,” Duering added.

The department has made little progress, Duering said.

“Between manpower and some of the bigger cases that we are dealing with right now … we have to triage stuff around here. We really focus on the violent crimes first.”

Matzner struggles to go visit her husband’s resting place. People have been kind, she said, making signs to mark Jim’s grave.

But despite best efforts, the plot is unkempt. It’s not anyone’s fault, Matzner said. The area couldn’t be seeded properly, derailed by the lawsuit.

“I was told during this whole lawsuit process to leave (the fallen stones) there. So they laid there,” Matzner said.

In June 2022, a retired Lincoln firefighter and a group from the York Fire Department came to Jim’s resting place on a Sunday, wielding borrowed equipment from a local farmer.

“They picked them up and we hauled them off the grave,” she said of the pieces.

There was nothing wrong with the stones themselves for the most part, but the bottom was cracked and damaged, Matzner said. 

“Everything looked nice (when it was installed). It looked kind of weird on the bottom, because it was on these two great big pieces of granite they kind of glued together.”

Since they fell that winter, Matzner has tried to find a way to repurpose the stones.

“The really sad part of this whole deal is that those stones are granite, and they’re just useless. I thought that maybe they could be made into a bench or something,” she said.

One headstone company told Matzner they would break them into pieces and put them in the Platte River with other granite scrap.

“It just stabbed me in the heart,” she said, her voice pained. “I think the worst part of all of this is that … didn’t my husband deserve better than this?”