ANTHONY SOMMER / TSOMMER@STARBULLETIN.COM
Thirteen headstones were pushed over and then broken in two by vandals at Lihue Cemetery last weekend, including this headstone of a 21-year-old woman who died in 1881.
Police still seeking leads
in Kauai cemetery vandalism
LIHUE >> Kauai police said yesterday they have no leads in the destruction of 13 tombstones at the Lihue Cemetery on the night of Oct. 10.
"If they had just turned over some headstones, you might just write it off as a mean Halloween prank, but after pushing down the headstones, they were maliciously broken in two," said Mike Ellis, vice president of the Lihue Cemetery Association.
Eleven of the 13 overturned headstones were broken, apparently by leaning them against their concrete bases and jumping up and down on them. The 11 that were broken were the most delicate in the cemetery. Two others that were knocked down, including the headstone of a 21-year-old woman who died in the 1880s, apparently were too heavy to be easily broken.
Many family vases in which flowers were placed also were smashed.
"It didn't appear they were targeting any particular family or ethnic group." Ellis said.
He noted the same vandals damaged several county vehicles at a baseyard on the road to the cemetery.
The cemetery is next to the power station at the old Lihue Plantation factory, which was closed last winter. Before that, lights from the power plant provided security lighting for the cemetery.
The entrance to the cemetery carries the date 1862 but at least one headstone of a Rice family member is dated five years earlier. It is the traditional cemetery for Lihue but never was run by the government.
"The cemetery was started by the Rice family," said Ellis, who is part of the Rice family and president of Hale Kauai, the island's largest building supply dealer. "It's a privately owned cemetery but it's available to the public.
"If you look at the headstones, there are Caucasians and Japanese and Filipino and Hawaiians. Every ethnic group is represented there."
The cemetery is a who's who of famous family names in Kauai history, especially from the sugar era. In addition to the Rice name, headstones carry the names Wilcox, McBryde, Eisenberg and many others.
There is one mass grave in the cemetery where victims of the worldwide influenza epidemic that followed World War I were buried.
The cemetery is surrounded only by a 2-foot brick wall. Ellis said that despite the vandalism there are no plans to build a higher barrier.
