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Man says father’s vandalized headstone is a ‘blow to the stomach’

Posted at 10:43 PM, Jun 16, 2019
and last updated 2019-06-17 07:03:47-04

COLORADO SPRINGS – For some folks in Colorado Springs, Father’s Day turned out to be a painful day as they gathered to remember their loved ones at Fairview Cemetery, only to find out several headstones had been vandalized and spray-painted.

Now, they want to alert others who may have loved ones buried there that this act of vandalism happened, so they don’t have to find out the hard way, and so they can get together to do something about it.

When Brian Ziegler went to the cemetery to pay respects to his father, who passed away three years ago.
But he was met with a hateful act.

“We saw all the red,” he said.

The crimson spray paint desecrating his father’s final resting place came as a shock to him and his mother who’d come to visit the headstone.

“My mother is almost 80 years old and I felt so badly because I never have brought her out here if we had known this happened,” he pointed out.

Zeigler believes this happened two weeks ago.

“It was definitely a blow to the stomach on number one, seeing what happened and number two, not being notified by the cemetery,” he said.

Several other headstones were also defaced and at this point, he says the cemetery offered to clean them with sandblasters. But he wants that to be a last resort.

“There’s two stones here that are over a hundred years old and very porous and a sandblaster would completely dissolve them,” he explained.

So he wants the cemetery to take a different approach, by doing their research on other methods to clean them and communicating with all the families affected.

“I think we need to work together on it,” he emphasized.

The families also want to say something to the vandals who did this.

“Don’t do this. I mean, you’re affecting so many other people,” Zeigler said.

“You don’t know them, you probably don’t care about them. But people do,” said Keith LaMee, who found out his cousin’s headstone had been vandalized.

“There’s no justification on that.”

Ziggler has filed a police report. Be’s encouraging affected families to do the same. If you have any information on who did this, you can call Colorado Springs Police at 719-444-7000 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 719-634-STOP.