VANDALS DEFILE GRAVES IN A.V.; TEN MARKERS OVERTURNED.Byline: Daily News Vandals toppled three of the oldest and largest headstones and broke seven wooden crosses at the century-old Palmdale Cemetery cemetery, name used by early Christians to designate a place for burying the dead. First applied in Christian burials in the Roman catacombs, the word cemetery came into general usage in the 15th cent. . The tiny graveyard's out-of-the-way location at 20th Street East and Avenue S makes it a regular target for vandalism The intentional and malicious destruction of or damage to the property of another. The intentional destruction of property is popularly referred to as vandalism. It includes behavior such as breaking windows, slashing tires, spray painting a wall with graffiti, and , often with occult overtones, said 78-year-old retired firefighter Lee DeRosier, the volunteer caretaker. The vandals apparently struck Sunday night Sunday Night, later named Michelob Presents Night Music, was an NBC late-night television show which aired for two seasons between 1988 and 1990 as a showcase for jazz and eclectic musical artists. , knocking over three headstones dating to the 1890s and belonging to pioneer Palmdale families, said DeRosier, who for six years has mowed the cemetery's sparse sparse - A sparse matrix (or vector, or array) is one in which most of the elements are zero. If storage space is more important than access speed, it may be preferable to store a sparse matrix as a list of (index, value) pairs or use some kind of hash scheme or associative memory. grass, set out flowers and kept the grave markers in shape. DeRosier discovered the vandalism Monday night while driving past the cemetery on his way home from shopping. The targeted graves all abut To reach; to touch. To touch at the end; be contiguous; join at a border or boundary; terminate on; end at; border on; reach or touch with an end. The term abutting implies a closer proximity than the term adjacent. the low block wall that separates the 3-1/2-acre plot from 20th Street East. ``They like to stay close to 20th Street since they can hide behind the wall,'' DeRosier said. Halloween is not the most common time for such vandalism, he said. ``On Halloween, I think they know better than to come out,'' he said. ``That's when the sheriff's (deputies) are cruising the area.'' DeRosier said he regularly finds signs of intruders with occult intentions: a candle left burning on a grave, or rotten rot·ten adj. rot·ten·er, rot·ten·est 1. Being in a state of putrefaction or decay; decomposed. 2. Having a foul odor resulting from or suggestive of decay; putrid. 3. fruit and a candle left on a red, white and black cloth. Two or three years ago vandals knocked over 17 headstones. A 400-pound grave monument has been toppled twice in two years. The first time, teen-age probation camp inmates from a Camp Munz-Mendenhall work crew hefted it back into position. The second time, DeRosier left it lying. His hope is that residents of the neighboring neigh·bor n. 1. One who lives near or next to another. 2. A person, place, or thing adjacent to or located near another. 3. A fellow human. 4. Used as a form of familiar address. v. housing tract, built in the late 1980s beside the cemetery, will keep an eye on the place. ``If we could get the people on the other side to look over the fence and call the Sheriff's (Department) if they ever hear or see anything, (it would help),'' he said. CAPTION(S): 2 Photos PHOTO (1--2--color in AV edition only) A toppled headstone, left, leans against the block wall of the Palmdale Cemetery as broken wooden crosses lie on either side after vandals apparently targeted the graveyard Sunday night. Caretaker Lee DeRosier, below, surveys the damage, which he says is a regular occurrence at the cemetery. Jeff Goldwater/Daily News |
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