Does anyone have a loved one interred at Restland Memorial Park in East Hanover?
I noticed yesterday that someone had stolen the bronze grave vase from my father's headstone. Apparently, people troll cemeteries and steal grave vases for the scrap metal.
I searched for info on the Restland Memorial thefts, and the only info I could find was a small blurb from this 2010 article:
Police investigate stolen vases from cemeteriesin East Hanover Township - New Jersey Hills Newspaper: Hanover Eagle News
(Gate of Heaven Cemetery right next door was also affected.)
There is also this more recent Patch article:
Decapitated Chicken, Theft Probed at Cemeteries - East Hanover-Florham Park, NJ Patch
This article is dated September 26, 2012 and says that three grave vases were reported stolen on September 11. Today, after I had visited my father's grave, I walked around some and counted 27 grave vases missing. TWENTY SEVEN! These jackholes are stealing even from the graves of veterans and little infants. The ones I saw missing were in the Garden View, Laburnum, Pine and Woodside sections of the cemetery. These sections are all towards the back in the northern half of the cemetery. There are probably more missing in the southern half.
If you Google "grave vase theft", you'll see that this is happening all over the country. In one case in Milwaukee, some scumbag, his girlfriend and mother stole hundreds of grave vases from a cemetery using a baby stroller. They reportedly could get $20 for 10 vases.
These vases cost $400 to $450 to replace! Or, you can spend about $125 to get some kind of cover for the vase hole (in case you don't want to replace the vase because who's to say it won't get stolen again?).
Restland says I can try to file a claim with my homeowner's insurance because the gravestone and the vase count as my property...I don't know about that. I'm not holding my breath. Anyone know anything about this? When I filed a theft report with the East Hanover police, I asked them about this and they, too, seemed skeptical.
In any case, if you have a loved one buried at Restland Memorial, Gate of Heaven, Hanover Cemetery (or any other cemetery for that matter), and haven't been there in a while, you might want to go and see if everything is in order at the grave (and if the grave has been burglarized, file a report with the police). My father's grave vase was stolen sometime between June and yesterday.
And of course, if anyone has any info (or tips or theories) regarding these thefts, please share.
If scrap metal and/or bronze dealers notice some creeps bringing in a bunch of grave vases, I would hope that they'd notify the police. But I'm not holding my breath on that either. I just hope that karma eventually catches up to them.
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