By EARL RINEHART
Tribune Staff Writer

CLEARWATER - The children of Eular Harris couldn't very well tell the mourners to come back another day when their mother would be buried in the right place, their attorney contended.
     A Pinellas County jury agreed Thursday. The panel awarded Harris' 11 children $380,000 because a Dunedin cemetery did not bury their mother next to her husband, Henry, who had died 15 years earlier.
     The adult children lawsuit alleged Parklawn Memory Gardens' confused records keeping resulted in their parents' being buried in two different areas. They were supposed to be buried side by side, the children contended.
     The award includes a $190,000 punitive damage award to cover grief as well as $15,000 direct payments to each of the children. The Largo couple had 12 children, but one had died.
     State auditors testified during the trial that their annual inspection of cemeteries turned up six discrepancies out of 14 plots checked in May at Parklawn. In the past two years the cemetery had a record of nine discrepancies out of 29 plots checked, said Wil Florin, one of the children's attorneys.
     He said the state fined Parklawn $2,000 in 1985 because of the mix-ups.
     Cemetery officials had contended that the casket next to where Eular Harris was buried contained her husband.
     Florin said Henry Harris' children watched their father's casket lowered into the ground at Parklawn in 1970. For years, family members visited the grave that had a ground-level stone marker.
     The last visit was on Father's Day 1985. In October of that year, Eular Harris died after suffering from cancer.
     When her funeral procession reached the cemetery, family members noticed something strange. The tent that was supposed to be over their mother's plot was about 100 feet north of where they knew their father to be buried. They also found his grave marker missing.
     Cemetery officials said the children were wrong - their father was buried next to their mother - and said a probe of the ground proved it. But the children said the person next to their mother was not their father.
     "They had just come from the chapel. You can't expect the children to tell their 200 guests to come back another day when everything is straightened out," Florin said. The burial took place.