For the third time in just over a month, vandals have targeted
Mount Hope Cemetery. They have caused extensive damage and dismay
among residents whose families are buried there and those who care
for the grounds.
For the third time in just over a month, vandals have targeted Mount Hope Cemetery.
They have caused extensive damage and dismay among residents whose families are buried there and those who care for the grounds.
The most recent incident crime occurred between Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, the same time as at least one other similar incident in recent weeks. Police have stepped up patrols of the area.
“It’s really quite outlandish,” Benjamin Bilbro of Johnson’s Funeral Home said Monday. “It’s very disrespectful … The person or group of individuals who did this (the latest vandalism) either just thought of it, just as a prank vandalism thing or they were trying to make some statement about God, belief in God.”
Bilbro said the recent vandalism – confined to the oldest parts of the cemetery – includes writing on a standing monument of Mary, “that says, in effect, that they don’t believe God is real.”
Other graffiti was nonreligious, and included a pentagram, hearts, drawings of a sexual nature and juvenile words.
One resident, who insisted on remaining anonymous because she dreaded possible retaliation from the criminals, said she visits her family’s graves each week and arrived Saturday morning to find the destruction.
“It’s shocking,” she said. “It’s totally disgraceful that people would stoop this low; it’s unspeakable to disgrace the dead. There was horrible writing on one of the major mausoleums (the Jelly family’s mausoleum).”
Gary Banister, who works with Johnson’s and has lived in Morgan Hill for 38 years, said the old section of the cemetery, particularly, is a mess, with red, black and blue graffiti and broken headstones and statues. Earlier vandalism incidents in January included broken headstones and orange paint. It is unknown at this time whether the three incidents are related.
The Morgan Hill mortuary owned Mount Hope until Dec. 1, 2004, according to John Andher of Habing Family Funeral Home in Gilroy, which purchased the cemetery from Johnson.
“They’re on top of it,” Andher said of Habing brothers Steve and Jim, who were not in the office Monday afternoon. “They’re big concern is to prevent it happening again.”
Bilbro said he had spoken to the Habings earlier.
“Their first and major concern is to get things cleaned up and taken care of as soon as possible,” he said.
The cemetery is located on Spring Avenue between Monterey Road and DeWitt Avenue, north and west of the post office.
“Certainly if this is a problem, the graveyard shift will add the cemetery to their list of requested patrol checks,” Police Lt. Joe Sampson said. “They have been busy with a rash of burglaries and auto thefts; that has really impacted the nighttime team. But if someone out there is involved in the desecration of people’s grave sites, we’ll have to see what we can do to address that.”
Banister said the latest vandalism was discovered Saturday morning. Officer Rod Nelson, who handles graffiti for the Morgan Hill Police Department, had come out, but did not know that it had been formally reported.
Bilbro said the funeral home has been receiving many phone calls about the vandalism.
“There are some family members who go out to the cemetery on a daily basis to put out new flowers or whatever, and we have always been the first to hear when something has been damaged,” he said. “But we haven’t had anything this extensive before. Something very small, usually.”
Banister said he knows what he would like to do to the perpetrators who have caused so much trouble for the owners and pain for the families of the desecrated graves.
“I’d like to dump them in a bucket of paint so they can see what it’s like,” Banister said.
Many old Morgan Hill families are buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, including the Jackson sisters, Gladys and Ruth; Telfers and Skeels, former Chief of Police John Moreno, and Morgan Hill’s heroine, Isola Kennedy, who died after fighting off a rabid mountain lion that had attacked a student of hers in 1909. She used a hatpin to distract the animal.
Monday afternoon Florencio Chavez and Fernando Aguirre were cleaning the paint off dozens of headstones with lacquer thinner. They said it was a difficult job made more difficult by the misting rain.
Marilyn Dubil covers education and law enforcement for The Times. She can be reached by e-mail at
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or phoning (408) 779-4106 ext. 202.
Carol Holzgrafe covers City Hall for The Times. She can be reached by e-mail at
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or phoning (408) 779-4106 Ext. 201.
