MILDRED — “I just can’t believe that something like that would happen,” said Don Mann, whose family’s mausoleum in Mildred’s Fairview Cemetery was vandalized last weekend.
The above-ground vault contains the remains of Mann’s grandmother, Lette, and mother, Mamie, whose caskets were broken into and robbed.
Mann’s grandfather, Louis, built the mausoleum in 1924 because his grandmother “didn’t want to be buried in the ground.”
The mausoleum also contains the remains of Louis Mann, as well as Don Mann’s father, Myrle, and uncle, Neil.
“[The vault] was kind of a sacred place to me,” Mann added.
Typically the door to the mausoleum is locked, but it appears the vandals were able to enter the interior without forceable entry.
“They got into it, but they didn’t destroy the door,” Mann said.
Mann said he’s been looking after the burial-place for years, and the event had “probably affected [him] more than anything.”
Man grew up on a farm in the Mildred area that was started in 1908, and which he still owns today.
ACCORDING to Sheriff Bryan Murphy, a deputy has been assigned to investigate the vandalism.
Murphy said the extent of the damage is beyond “kids breaking headstones.”
Murphy hinted his department has some significant leads, but could not be more specific.
He did remark, however, that a series of other “strange” events had taken place around the same area over the past couple years, especially northwest of Dawson Lake, and suggested there may be a connection.
Chillingly, such events are possibly linked to the occult and ritual practices involving animals for which an explanation has yet to surface.
Murphy called the cases connected to Fairview Cemetery and the Mildred area “unsettling,” and pointed to Kansas statute 21-6205 as guiding the appropriate legal response.
21-6205 is the number assigned to the crime of “criminal desecration,” and its most relevant subsections are described as follows:
