msantarita@patuxent.com

Jim Johnson has worked at St. John's Cemetery in Ellicott City for more than 30 years. But when he came to work Sept. 17, he saw something he had never seen before: dozens of grave stones and monuments pushed over, some of them destroyed.

"It's kind of like you think that you dreamed this and somebody would wake you up and it didn't happen, but it did happen," said Johnson, 66, who is the superintendent of the cemetery on St. John's Lane.

In all, he said, 54 gravestones and monuments had been vandalized, causing an estimated $20,000 to $30,000 worth of damage.

Police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn confirmed that police were called to the cemetery on Sept. 17 and found numerous gravestones overturned. Officers took pictures at the scene but were unable to find the perpetrator at the scene, Llewellyn said.

The cemetery is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the vandals in the case, Johnson said.

Johnson said about 5,800 graves are located in the cemetery, which was established in 1863 and had its first burial in 1877. Most of the desecrated graves were in older parts of the cemetery, dating back to the 1800s, he said.

The vandals worked hard to desecrate the cemetery, he said, pushing over some extremely heavy tombstones, including one that weighed about 3,500 pounds.

"They must have really had their adrenaline flowing to push them over," Johnson said.

Some of the stones in the older parts of the cemetery were old and weak, and were crushed when other stones fell on them during the vandalism spree, Johnson said.

"The best way to describe that is, `Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,' because they just crumbled and no one's going to put them back together," he said.

Working cemetery

While St. John's Cemetery dates back to the 1800s, it is a working cemetery and regularly hosts burials, Johnson said. It is run as a nonprofit organization by a five-person board of directors, he said.

While cemetery employees are responsible for the upkeep of the grounds, individual lot owners are responsible for the graves themselves, Johnson said.

In cases of old graves, however, the cemetery probably will have to cover the repair costs, since family members are no longer around to foot the bill, Johnson said.

"When you're talking about somebody's who's been dead since Eighteen-something, there's nobody left," Johnson said, adding that he is waiting to hear from the cemetery's insurance company.

After three decades at the cemetery, Johnson is taking the vandalism personally.

"It kind of becomes a part of you," he said. "You feel like it kind of happened to you. You really, really hope they get caught."

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