Cemetery vandalized; owners ask for help

Wednesday morning an Evangeline Parish Sheriff deputy responded to a vandalism complaint at Evangeline Memorial Park. The vandals had removed nearly all of the flowers and flower vases from the mausoleum located towards the back of the cemetery.
The cemetery’s owners Rodney Jenkins and Sharon Blankenship were unaware of the vandalism until Thursday morning when a person repairing a marble plaque on one of the mausoleum’s vaults saw the mess and notified the owners.
Blankenship said, “We wish that a sheriff deputy could start patrolling through here if they are passing by. I’m not asking for them to do it everyday, but every once in a while could help.”
Blankenship’s frustration comes from the fact that her and her father’s cemetery has been vandalized many times over the years.
The cemetery owner said, “Something like this is happening all of the time. We use to have a flag program for military burials, but we can’t do that anymore because someone stole all of our flags and all of the flag poles had been laid on the ground. And then, last month we had a statue of Mary disappear, and we ended up finding it buried in flower bed at the cemetery.”
Besides throwing the majority of the flowers and vases from the mausoleum on the ground, Blankenship said, ““It also looks like someone used the vase rings to climb to the top of the mausoleum and bent all of the rings.” These are the rings that hold the vases on each marble plaque.
In the vandal’s process of bending the vase rings, they also managed to break one of the marble plaques off of the mausoleum.
After contacting the EPSO multiple times Thursday morning, a deputy finally arrived at the cemetery located on Chataignier Road a little over two hours after Blankenship first reported what she had found.
When the officer arrived, he informed Blankenship that more vandalism had been done since making his first report on Wednesday.
On Thursday there was a jacket, a pile of burnt sticks that looked like they had been used to build a fire, burnt pieces of paper that looked to be someone’s mail, marble pieces from the statue of Mary’s fingers that were broken off, and Nutter Butter cookie wrappers. More flowers and vases were also found on the top of the mausoleum.
When the cemetery owners checked the security footage, they were unable to see anything because the camera facing the mausoleum wasn’t working properly.
Blankenship however, said, “That problem has been fixed. My husband has already changed the camera so we will be able to see now.”
The local cemetery owners have asked that if anyone has any information concerning this matter to please contact Sharon Blankenship at (337) 363-7171.