Students Chop Cemetery’s Pine Trees
Santa Claus might not have to check his list twice to judge the naughtiness of five college students in Michigan who hopped the fence of a Jewish cemetery on December 6. According to police, the students cut down a pair of pine trees to decorate their dormitory.
Four 18-year-old boys and one 19-year-old girl, all from the University of Detroit Mercy, the largest Catholic university in Michigan, were caught after a neighbor called the police. The neighbor had spotted their attempt to steal the two trees from Machpelah Cemetery, a Jewish graveyard in Ferndale.
Upon being spotted, the students left the sawed-down trees behind, but police caught them in a car.
“It was a very juvenile thing to do,” said Lt. Norm Raymond of the Ferndale Police Department, who downplayed any conscious disrespect the students might have had for the religious significance of stealing Christmas decorations from a Jewish resting place. The cemetery, which abuts a small city park as well as a pair of other cemeteries, was not marked from the side on which they entered. “I’m not sure they knew what they were jumping into,” Raymond said.
University spokesman Gary Lichtman said in a statement: “We were disappointed to learn of the alleged actions of these young people. We have extremely high expectations of all our students and will closely monitor this situation.” The school said it will await the result of the police investigation before deciding to take any action.
The students face charges of misdemeanor larceny, malicious destruction of property and trespassing, carrying potential penalties that include jail time, fines and payment of costs to replace the destroyed property.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
