LAWRENCE, MASS. (WHDH) - Two Lawrence families are looking for answers after the gravestones of their loved ones were vandalized — one of them belonging to the 18-year-old victim of the Merrimack Valley Gas Disaster.
Green graffiti covered Leonel Rondon’s headstone. Police said his family found it that way while visiting the site at St. Mary’s cemetery on Tuesday.
Michelee Geronimo said her son’s headstone was also vandalized in the same graveyard in recent days and according to her, this is not the first time something like this has happened.
“To take from my family – the little bit of peace we can have just sitting with him … it’s disgusting,” she said.
Her son, Nike Colon was murdered in 2018 and buried along Barker Street. A year later, Geronimo claims the headstone was topped over and the stone chiseled. Not too long after that, she said oil was dumped on it.
She and her family have removed the headstone from St. Mary’s but her son’s body remains in its original plot — for now.
“This is what its come to,” she said. “Our family had to take a stone out of a cemetery and bring it here because I wasn’t sleeping. It just breaks my heart.”
Cemetery Director James Jacobs said the incidents are believed to be gang-related.
The vandalism to Rondon’s grave comes around the two year anniversary of the Columbia Gas Disaster that claimed his life. He was just 18-years-old when a house exploded and the chimney fell on the car he was sitting in.
“He’s just an innocent victim of a terrible thing and he should be regarded in that way,” Jacobs said of Rondon.
Instead of peace in his final resting place, there is disruption.
“There’s no reason – as mothers who buried our children – continue as we grieve to go through this,” Geronimo said.
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