Teen arrested in cemetery vandalism

OREM — The vandalism of a life-size statue of Jesus Christ at a Utah County cemetery was a teenager's prank, not an anti-Christian statement, police say.

Orem police on Friday arrested a 15-year-old Orem boy in connection with the vandalism at the Timpanogos Memorial Gardens Cemetery, 1000 N. 400 East, Orem.

The head, a hand and some fingers were broken off the statue the night of March 5, police said.

Acting on a tip from three students at Canyon View Junior High School, detectives recovered the statue's head Friday from the back yard of the house where the Orem boy lives.

Police say the teenager, a ninth-grader at Canyon View, was booked into the Slate Canyon juvenile holding facility in Provo.

David Condon, cemetery sexton, said the statue is valued at $20,000. All but a few small pieces of the statue have been recovered, and repairs are expected to take about a week, Condon said.

"If we hadn't gotten the head back, it would have been a pretty major job to fix it — if it could have even been done at all," he said.

Condon said the head is fairly intact, with only a few chips and broken pieces that need to be repaired.

"All in all," he said, "it looks pretty good."

Orem Police Lt. Doug Edwards said the "senselessness" of the vandalism led detectives to believe that the crime was committed by a juvenile or juveniles.

"I think the detective thought that was a rational place to start, hoping we were dealing with a young kid that did a delinquent act as opposed to some rational and thinking adult," Edwards said.

Condon said he was worried that the statue was vandalized by a person or a group trying to send some kind of anti-Christian message.

"The way things are now, who can say?" he said. "I'm just glad it turned out to be a kid's stupid prank."

Police received a tip from the students after Berg Mortuary, which operates the cemetery, offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the damage.

Police notified local schools last week and by Friday had received information from confidential sources leading to the arrest of the 15-year-old.

"We have officers in the schools and felt like that was a reasonable place to start," Edwards said. "As it turned out, that's as far as we needed to go."

Police said the teenager admitted to detectives that he had purposely taken a hammer to the cemetery to damage the statue because "he wanted to."

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