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Vandals Desecrate Headstones At Lockport Cemtery Over Memorial Day Weekend

(CBS) – Police in Lockport are hoping to track down the person or people who vandalized a cemetery in the southwest suburb over the Memorial Day weekend.

"There are people that served in the War of 1812 there all the way to the Civil War and it's still an active cemetery," Lockport Mayor Steve Streit tells WBBM's Bernie Tafoya.

Police Chief Terry Lemming says 79 headstones were knocked over. Some of them were "priceless and irreplaceable," he says.

WBBM's Bernie Tafoya

Lemming declines to venture a guess about a motive behind the vandalism, such as whether it was a prank by young people or the act of drunks. He says CrimeStoppers is offering up to a $5,000 reward for information leading to the person or people who did it.

"Some of the monuments were already tilting and ready to fall, so it didn't take much to push them over so when they pushed over, they cracked. Some of them are not damaged at all. They just need to be put back up on the pedestal or stood back up again," he says.

The historic cemetery does not have a fence around it and is easily accessible by car and foot, so Chief Lemming has officers driving past the cemetery more often now.

He figures the vandalism happened between last Friday night and Saturday morning.

Jim Hartley said the damage on Monday while tending to his family plot.

It was a sad reminder that nothing is sacred, he said.

"How would they like if it was their parents or their brothers and sisters?" he told CBS 2's Marissa Bailey. "Whoever did this needs to turn themselves in."

Meanwhile, Mayor Streit says this was not the first recent setback for Lockport Cemetery.  He says that after members of the cemetery's board of directors died, the caretaker ran it until he died about a month ago.

The city of Lockport is trying to find a way to have a new board installed as well as to find money to maintain it.

Lockport was incorporated in 1830, seven years before the city of Chicago was incorporated.

 

 

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