The damage occurred in a section dedicated to veterans at the Lafayette Cemetery in Grindstone.
“They ran over them, the stone, the marble underneath. It’s broke in half. They’re crushed into the ground,” Grindstone-area resident David Bella described.
The headstones appear to have been run over, with tire tracks to prove it.
Flags, flowers and other decorations placed on top of graves were damaged in the garden of a new section for veterans at the Lafayette Cemetery.
“It breaks my heart,” Bella said. “These are veterans. They’re flags. They just plow them over.”
Bella said his parents and wife are buried at the cemetery, and he has reported the damage and alleged disrespect by maintenance crews many times.
But Bella said there’s no accountability or oversight.
“Their equipment is too heavy. They know it,” Bella added. “They just run over graves or breaking headstones. There’s vases that people can’t even get out of their headstones because they’ve smashed them into the headstones.”
Bella said maintenance crews were digging a new grave in the section of the cemetery this week using heavy machinery, driving directly on top of the headstones.
“As far as I know, they’re supposed to put plywood down,” Bella said. “They carry sheets of plywood, stacks of it. They never use it.”
Crews showed up again Wednesday at the veterans’ section. The workers appeared to clean off some of the headstones with water and brushes, while also fixing several flags.
According to Bella, that’s not enough. He said this hasn’t been the first incident at the cemetery and fears it won’t be the last.
“For instance, when they buried my wife, they’d run over the base and it was smashed into the ground,” Bella said. “I literally brought my own tools out and I managed to fight it, and I got it back up out of there for the people because they had stuck flowers there. Well, they ran them over with a lawn mower.”
The cemetery’s corporate office said if its park services teams damage a memorial, they will replace and repair it.
The statement goes on to say, “To our knowledge, no memorials have been damaged by park equipment.”
