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Walter White’s final resting place isn’t so final after all.
Fans who pushed for a burial site for the fictional “Breaking Bad” protagonist at Sunset Memorial Park are withdrawing their plans after a petition against the burial site was started by residents, according to a press release from the funeral organizers.
The petition, which started on Ipetition.com, began circulating on Saturday after the cemetery permitted about 200 fans of the AMC show to hold a funeral service for White. “Breaking Bad,” which was filmed on location in Albuquerque, recently had its series finale.
According to the petition, Albuquerque residents with relatives buried in the area were worried that “adding a physical grave site will encourage tourists to visit a sacred burial site of hundreds and hundreds of loved ones. The ‘officials’ should not put the family members through such disrespect during the process of deciding whether or not too many people are visiting the makeshift grave.”
“My son is buried about 15 yards from where the makeshift gravesite is,” Manuel Montano, the first person to provide a signature for the petition, told KOB Saturday. “This is a place of mourning. It’s not a spectacle.”
By press time, 964 people had signed the online petition.
In response to the petition, organizers will move the headstone, which was not set in the ground at the Sunset site, to Village Shops in Los Ranchos.
Vaughn Hendren, general manager of local cemetery Sunset Memorial Park, said a petition to remove the burial site was misinformed.
“There’s no need for the petition, because it’s a petition to take a stone that is not there,” Hendren said. “They were upset that there was going to be a headstone there, and they got involved in the media’s spin on it.”
Hendren said such worry was unnecessary because White’s graveyard marker had already been put away. He said Sunset informed the funeral’s organizers that they should remove the headstone if people started to flock into the site, and that the site was never planned to be a permanent tourist attraction.
“The petition is kind of a moot point,” he said. “I know the media got a hold of this and didn’t give all the facts. After the service on Saturday night, the headstone was taken by the organizers to the reception. The headstone will stay at the organizer’s location, and the headstone will never come back to Sunset.”
The organizers are working with Sunset staff to replace White’s burial site in the cemetery with a memorial site commemorating local “homeless people who have lost their lives,” according to the release.
Sunset’s staff will always prioritize respect for their clientele before local fandom, Hendren said.
“We don’t want it to be an attraction,” he said. “It’s a cemetery first and foremost, and our allegiance is to our families that we serve.”
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