BATON ROUGE — What began as a mother’s moment of joy ten years ago has now become a haunting ordeal. Kelli Domino still remembers the day she found out she was having a baby girl.
“It was a happy moment. I cried. I wanted a daughter,” Domino said. “I have my oldest, Ace. I had him first, so he’s the oldest of the bunch. Then I had her — she would have been ten — and they are three years apart. They were like two peas in a pod.”
But her daughter, Mi’Kell Amour Livous, died in 2017 from respiratory failure.
“One Friday, I took her in to Baton Rouge General, and found out she had strep. We went home and later at night, she was asleep, and I’m guessing, from the strep and everything, her throat closed up on her,” Kelli said emotionally. Eight years later, the agony can still be heard in her voice.
Shortly after her 2nd birthday, Kelli buried her at Winnfield Funeral Home and Cemetery in Baton Rouge, in a section then known as “Babyland.” Her second son, who she lost in a miscarriage two years later, was buried beside her.
Now, nearly a decade later, Domino says Babyland no longer exists in that area — and neither does her daughter’s headstone.
“When you go there, there’s literally no Babyland anymore,” she said. “When I went there about three weeks ago, I couldn’t find her headstone. I started panicking and freaking out. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I know my daughter is here, but I cannot find her stone.’”
‘Your daughter’s probably not right here, or she doesn’t have a headstone.”
Domino said she contacted the funeral home multiple times but could only reach an answering service. Weeks passed with no return call. When she finally went in person, staff pulled out a plot book — the record of who’s buried where — but couldn’t locate Mi’Kell’s exact grave.
“The maintenance man told me, ‘Your daughter’s probably not right here, or she doesn’t have a headstone,’” she said. “I said, ‘What do you mean she don’t have a headstone? She’s been here since 2017.’ I even showed him pictures in my phone of her headstone right there. He scratched his head and said, ‘Well, she got to be somewhere around here.’ He said he’d put in a work order to get it moved, but that was two weeks ago, and nothing has been done.”
When Domino and the Unfiltered with Kiran team visited the cemetery, the area where Babyland once was looked neglected and disturbed. The ground was uneven and bare — the only section not covered in grass. A small sign planted directly in the dirt read “Space Available.”
“It’s like they’re putting people on top of people that’s already in that spot,” Domino said. “Because I know for a fact she’s there. But when you stand over it, it’s just dirt.”
Domino broke down crying when the funeral home’s vice president and general manager approached, asking the UWK to stop filming. Inside an office, management showed a cemetery map indicating that Babyland had been relocated. They attributed the missing headstones and uneven ground to water erosion, saying that heavy rain can cause graves to sink or shift.
But Domino isn’t convinced.
“If you knew the land was sinking, you shouldn’t have buried people there,” she said. “I feel like they’re just collecting money at this point.”
She says visiting the grave had always been part of her healing process — something she worked up the courage to do again this year after years of grief.
“I just built my heart up to start back going, and now this is happening,” she said. “It’s like losing her all over again.”
One Week Later: No Resolution
A week after UWK first visited, Domino says she spoke again with the cemetery’s Vice President, Marcus Lewis. What she heard next left her even more confused.
“He said they looked in a storage room where they keep the temporary headstones, and Mi’Kell wasn’t in there,” Domino said. “So I’m like, why would it be temporary if it was paid for? He said he’s not sure who moved it. He said he didn’t come in until 2022, and I said, ‘She had a headstone in 2022 — that same exact one.’ So is it buried under the dirt? He said they took a metal stick and stuck it in the ground to see if they hit anything, and they didn’t. So I asked, ‘Is she still in that spot?’ And he said, ‘I’m guessing she’s still in that spot.’”
Domino said she was shocked to hear the term “temporary headstone” used for what she says was a permanent marker.
“I never heard anything like that before,” she said. “I thought the temporary was like a little stick with a plastic frame and a name — not an actual concrete headstone.”
Funeral Home Response
Lewis, the vice president of Winnfield Funeral Home, confirmed to UWK that Mi’Kell’s body is still buried in the cemetery but said the headstone is missing.
“I spoke with the mother yesterday, and I told her that the headstone is not there. The body is there,” Lewis said. “I asked her what she wanted to do, how she wanted to proceed. She told me she would get back with me after she talked to her mother, and that’s the last I’ve heard.”
He said the only current option is to perform a disinterment — to dig up the grave to confirm Mi’Kell’s location.
“The only options right now is do a disinterment,” Lewis said.
Searching for Accountability
The Louisiana Cemetery Board oversees cemeteries and burial practices in the state. Families with unresolved issues can file complaints through the board’s website, which has the authority to investigate cemetery management and record-keeping violations.
For Kelli Domino, none of that brings comfort. She just wants to find peace where she laid her little girl to rest.
“I just want my daughter’s headstone back where it belongs,” she said quietly. “That’s all I’m asking.”
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