Police seek help in finding cemetery vandals

By ROGER ADKINS, radkins@newsandsentinel.com
PARKERSBURG — Vandals destroyed between 30 and 40 historic tombstones during the weekend at Parkersburg Memorial Gardens.

The incident occurred sometime between Friday evening and Saturday morning, said Lt. John Young, Parkersburg Police Department detective bureau. Vandals went through the cemetery, situated behind Stadium Field and overlooking Murdoch Avenue, knocking over and damaging grave stones.

Some of the stones were knocked over, others were smashed, Young said. The damage was between $30,000 and $40,000.

The police department, the cemetery owner and local historians are seeking the public’s help in identifying the culprits.

“The public is our best shot at solving something like this. Hopefully, someone will talk about it and someone will give us information on who did it,” Young said.

Okey Phares, owner of Parkersburg Memorial Gardens, said the cemetery has been vandalized in the past.

“They’ve got us two or three times. This time it was probably 30 to 40 stones, various sizes. They’re in the old historical section. Those date way back into the 1800s even,” he said. “If anybody hears of anything, just report it to the police department. Some of the people buried there are possibly founders of our area. To me, this is just not proper.”

Local historian Jim Miracle said he believes there was more than one suspect because many of the stones that were overturned were too large for one person to handle. The path of destruction indicates the suspects may have entered the cemetery from the Avery Street side.

There’s no funding available to repair the damage. Phares and Miracle are teaming up to get help in that area as well. Anyone wishing to donate volunteer hours or other resources to repair the damage can call (304) 428-5796.

“Any that they broke, you can’t replace. We’re going to try to fix as many of them as we can,” Phares said.

Phares said he can’t believe anyone would want to vandalize a cemetery.

“It’s disrespectful. You have no idea what they’re even thinking when they do something like that,” he said.

Work on repairing the damage will begin when the weather permits, Phares said. Workers might be able to repair some of the smashed stones with epoxy.

“When the weather warms up, we’ll start working on it,” Phares said.

Phares said though it seems there are so many disrespectful people who perpetrate this type of vandalism, there are others who genuinely abhor this type of behavior.

“I had a young lady who called me on the phone who wanted to report that she saw it. She walks through there every day to go to work. She said it just made her sick. Now that’s character. If everybody had that, we’d be a lot better off,” Phares said.