It took only a few months to repair the vandalism at a Jewish cemetery near St. Louis in 2017.
But finding and then sentencing the man who did it took years.
The man, Alzado M. Harris, 35, was sentenced to three years of probation in St. Louis County Circuit Court on Thursday for toppling 154 headstones in the cemetery in University City, Missouri, in February 2017, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office, Josi Nielsen, said Monday.
Harris pleaded guilty this month to felony charges of institutional vandalism, according to court records. He must also pay $5,000 in restitution, maintain full-time work and take an anger management course, the records show.
“We are grateful that the case has been solved, and resolved,” Anita Feigenbaum, the executive director of the cemetery, Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery, said Monday.
On the morning of Feb. 20, 2017, the headstones were found pushed over and disembodied from their foundations at the cemetery in University City, which has a population of about 35,000. The cemetery is more than 100 years old, and Feigenbaum said the headstones had been made of marble, granite and other materials and hand-carved with English, Hebrew or Yiddish.
Alzado M. Harris Source: AP
The authorities scanned video surveillance, but it did not cover the southeast corner of the cemetery, where the headstones had been overturned, she said. They also examined DNA from a jacket that was discovered under a toppled headstone, said Feigenbaum, who was kept informed as the investigation progressed.
The DNA led to Harris after investigators matched samples on the jacket with a sample obtained from his previous criminal record profile, authorities told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2018.
The authorities said Harris was drunk and angry when he did it, the newspaper reported.
The University City Police Department and Harris’ lawyer did not immediately return requests for comment Monday.
Volunteers from a local monument company helped to reset vandalized headstones in the cemetery in 2017. Source: Getty Images
The vandalism in 2017 came amid a series of anti-Semitic attacks, bomb threats and other acts of vandalism against Jewish centers across the country, sending ripples of concern throughout the Jewish community.
The FBI had been prepared to join the investigation if it turned out to have involved a possible federal civil rights violation, a spokeswoman for the bureau, Rebecca Wu, said Monday.
But “no information came to light suggesting” a potential violation, Wu said in an email.
In the first two months of 2017 before the University City vandalism, at least 53 Jewish community centers around the country had received bomb threats, including centers in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Baltimore; Birmingham, Alabama; Milwaukee; and Wilmington, Delaware, according to the JCC Association of North America at the time. Some of them had reported being repeatedly threatened.
Reports at the time included swastika graffiti found on some college campuses as well as the New York City subway, according to a report in The Times that year.
“He was not motivated by hate, but the incident had impact as if he was,” the Anti-Defamation League of St. Louis said in a statement last year, commending the investigation that led to Harris’ arrest.
A week after the vandalism in Missouri, the police in Philadelphia found about 100 toppled headstones at the Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery there.
The Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery, which began accepting burials in 1893, was founded by Russian immigrants whose aim was to give Jews access to a proper burial no matter their financial means, Feigenbaum said. There are now about 22,500 plots.
Cemetery administration officials got wind on Feb. 19, 2017, that something was amiss, she said, when visitors reported seeing some overturned headstones. The news alone was not so startling — tree branches, bad weather or storms can affect plots in a cemetery.
But the next day, the groundskeeper went out to explore, Feigenbaum said, and found headstone after headstone upended. The damage was not scattered, such as might be seen after a storm.
The groundskeeper contacted Feigenbaum, she said.
“At first he was like: ‘No, there are more than 50 down. It was no weather. Something happened,'” Feigenbaum said. “I called the police even before I got there.”
“It wasn’t like one here, one there,” she said. “It was condensed in one area, so it had a significant impact. It looked deliberate.”
Survivors of relatives buried in the cemetery searched the grounds, clutching slips of paper describing where relatives were buried to see if their plots were affected.
Feigenbaum said the authorities told her that Harris had squeezed in through a chained gate. Video surveillance failed to cover the spot.
The Jewish community swung into action to repair the headstones, she said. That meant trying to track down families and survivors, both in the United States and other countries, which was a search complicated by scope, generations and time. Many of the headstones marked graves from the 1920s through 1940s, she said.
They were also obligated under Jewish law to replace the headstones with exact replicas.
“Being an Orthodox Jewish cemetery, we have to adhere to Jewish law as well,” she said. “If you can’t find the family, you have to replace it with the exact same, or better.”
Muslim and Christian communities raised funds, she said. Schoolchildren painted small rocks, which in Jewish tradition are placed on or near headstones as markers. There were organized vigils and cleanups. The plots were repaired before the summer of 2017, she said.
“It really affects every religion and every single person,” Feigenbaum said. “Everybody has somebody who passed away. It happened to hit a Jewish cemetery at a time of possible and increasing attacks out there. That is why you saw communities coming out.”
By Christine Hauser © 2019 The New York Times
