Girls, 12 and 14, arrested in cemetery vandalism

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UNITY – Two juvenile girls were arrested Wednesday on a charge of vandalizing 42 gravestones at the Quaker Hill Cemetery and the nearby Quaker Hill Christian Church, where they broke a window to gain entrance Monday night, according to church members.

The vandals went into a supply room in the basement of the small church, which serves about 50 people, opened a can of white paint, and painted all the cupboards and floors, broke glassware, and wrote obscene and blasphemous graffiti on the walls upstairs, said Leroy Hunter, a church deacon.

Beverly Winship, a member of the Unity Cemetery Committee said two girls, ages 12 and 14, had been arrested in the crime, but she believed they had to have had accomplices.

Maine State Police Trooper Thomas Welch, who is in charge of the investigation, could not be reached Wednesday to verify the arrests.

“It’s my understanding that those same two girls stole a car here in Unity yesterday morning and were apprehended in Oakland the same day,” Winship said Wednesday.

Winship said she doesn’t believe two young girls could have done so much damage. The graffiti was inscribed on the walls of the church at the shoulder height of a 6-foot-tall person, she said. Also, some of the slabs that the headstones were mounted on were upended even though they had been embedded about 8 inches deep in the ground.

“Either the girls are awfully big, or they have some accomplices,” she said.

Winship said she saw no signs of alcohol use, such as empty beer cans, at the scene.

“I was up there before the state police or the sheriff or the cleaning crew was there, and there was no sign of alcohol in the cemetery or the church,” she said.

Winship said she counted 42 damaged gravestones out of the nearly 250 total in the cemetery. She said she wanted to reassure the families of the dead whose graves were vandalized that a monument company has agreed to put the stones back at no cost to them.

“We were lucky,” she said. “They could have taken a sledgehammer to the stones and broken them. Only two were broken.”

Winship said the vandalism happened sometime Monday night and was reported to the town office Tuesday morning.

“I think one of Leroy Hunter’s hired hands discovered it while they were going by with a piece of farm equipment,” she said. Hunter’s farm is visible from the front door of the church.

“It’s a hard thing to put a price on,” said Hunter, 89, a World War II veteran, church deacon and longtime parishioner. “It’s more what they’ve done to our feelings to think someone would do a thing like that.”

The church was built as a Friends Meeting House in 1827 and remained a Quaker meeting place until 1940, when Hunter’s father and mother bought the building to preserve it, he said. The Hunter family maintained it and returned it to a nondenominational building called the Quaker Hill Christian Church. Services now follow conservative Baptist lines, Hunter said.

The church has no minister but is seeking one.

“We have people come in from other churches and conduct services,” he said.

On Wednesday, Hunter praised the cleanup effort of Norm’s Cleaning Service, the Augusta contractor hired to restore the church’s interior.

“We’re going to come out of this better than we were before,” he said. “I’ve got confidence in things. A lot of people have offered to help in so many ways.”

Alnetta Levesque, 67, a longtime resident of Unity, walked through the cemetery Wednesday afternoon looking at the stones of so many of her relatives.

The gravestone of Levesque’s brother Arthur Crowell, who died in Vietnam in 1969, lay on its side, while another stone belonging to Robert Blanchard, who died at age 86 in 1875, was overturned.

Another ancestral grave, the oldest in the cemetery, belonging to Mertie Blanchard, who died at age 1 on April 25, 1821, also was pushed over.

A miniature stone with the inscription “Welcome to my flower garden,” was smashed into pieces in front of the grave of Roberta Crowell, another of Levesque’s ancestors.

Freedom resident David Bridges, who also had come to look at the damage Wednesday, called the vandalism “criminal, obviously. It’s beyond description. I was devastated when I heard about it.”

Bridges said he has friends whose family members are buried in the cemetery.

“I know some of these stones belonged to people who died over 100 years ago,” Bridges said. “I can’t imagine why anybody would do it, that’s the thing.”

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY KATE COLLINS

Bev Winship of Unity walks by the overturned tombstone of her mother and grandparents Wednesday as she does a survey of the vandalism done to the Quaker Hill Cemetery in Unity. Winship estimates around 45 stones were overturned, including some that were cracked. The church itself was also broken into a vandalized.