Grave Robbers

Graveyards fascinate me.

No, it's not a morbid, "I sleep in a coffin" type of fascination. If you think about it, unless we are published authors or artists, our gravestone is our lasting statement to the world as to who we were. Even pop culture has figured this out, remember the "What do you want on your tombstone" commercials?

I got interested in grave stones when my Nana would take me and my sister to visit the graves of her parents. Not interested in paying respects to the dead I never met, my Papu and I would walk around the grave yard and he would tell me the legends and lore behind the gravestones. There is the mysteriously ball on top of the Houghton family plot-- the solid granite ball weighs more than 4000 lbs and has somehow rotated more than two feet on its base.  There's the grave of a toymaker whose stone says, "Goin' but know not where".

Some of the stones are sad: next to my brother's grave is the grave of another little boy with his picture inlaid in the stone-- the little one died in a fire. A little ways down the field there is a headstone for a teenage girl who died in a car crash when she swerved to avoid a chicken that had flown into the road. A talented softball player, her gravestone has a ball and bat on it.

Graves, no matter the inscription, demand the respect for the dead, because the dead cannot defend themselves. So that's why I find grave robbing and vandalism absolutely disgusting.

On the grave of Sara Larned Osgood in Yantic, CT sits a bronze statue of a kneeling woman in flowing robes. The piece weighs 450 lbs with an estimated value of $35,000, and has been a part of the cemetary for $120 years.

I should say that it sat there.  The statue disappeared a few weeks ago from the Yantic Cemetary. It turned up days ago at a scrap yard, cut into pieces. The alleged thief said it was pieces from a Statue of Liberty (replica) that tipped over, and netted about $200. Suspicious, the owners of Willimantic Waste Paper called the cops.

Sean P. McNee, 43, of 182 S. Park St. in Willimantic has been charged with first-degree larceny, first-degree criminal mischief and desecration of a grave site.

It completely sickens me. I understand times are tough, but this is a public monument. Publically owned does not mean that one citizen can lay claim to a piece and use it  for their own personal gain. I hope that he and his cohorts, when they are found, be prosecuted to the highest extent of the law.



Speaking of gravesites, watching Ducky weeping at his mother's grave site almost broke my heart, though it made me feel good to know he's reinventing his life according to his own rules, not his mothers! Seeing Gibbs lying on the exam table freaked me out, however, because I hope it's not foreshadowing anything to come!