Locals sickened by senseless vandalism at cemetery

An act of vandalism at the Cobar Cemetery last week, where eight graves were graffitied has appalled local residents. (NB Photo is generic and does not necessarily depict the affected graves.)

Cobar residents were sickened last week to hear of a senseless act of vandalism at the Cobar Cemetery.
Local resident Rebecca Dowling alerted the community via social media last week of the incident after she and her son Darcy had visit-ed the cemetery on Thursday morning and found graffiti on a number of graves.
Rebecca said they cleaned off the graffiti from three of their family’s graves and then did a walk around and found more graffiti on another five graves.
They also cleaned up those sites (after tak-ing some photos) and reported the matter to police.
“The damage was mainly to the photos on the headstones which had been drawn on with a black permanent marker,” Rebecca said.
She said they also found profanity written on a cement slab base on one grave.
Her warning post on social media had a swift response from concerned residents, many eager to find out if the graves of their loved ones had been among those vandalised.
“Absolutely no excuse for this sort of be-haviour” one person wrote while others de-scribed it as: “unacceptable and terrible” and “so disrespectful”.
One resident said: “Our loved ones deserve to rest in peace” while another wrote they “just can’t believe someone would do this”.
A number of former Cobar residents with relatives who have been laid to rest at the Cobar Cemetery were concerned as they were not able to go and see if their loved ones’ graves had been damaged.
Their minds were put to rest when a local resident offered to go and check for them.
Police attended the cemetery on Friday morning and their investigations into the inci-dent are continuing.
Anyone with any information about the incident is urged to contact Cobar Police or Crime Stoppers.