Cemeteries' New Thieves Steal Angels From The Dead
03-30-1994 Times Picayune

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The night before her 14-year-old daughter Rita died in 1936,
Lily Gerrets dreamed that an angel carried her sick child away.

So it was fitting that the family, to salve its grief, bought a
40-inch marble angel for Rita's grave at St. Bartholomew
Cemetery in Algiers.

For years, Rita's parents made frequent trips to the cemetery to
clean the statue. After they died, her sister, Shirley LeBlanc,
had the angel placed above the three graves.

But last All Saint's Day, LeBlanc found that the angel had been
carried away by thieves.

"When I walked into the cemetery, my husband thought I had taken
ill, because I started screaming like a banshee," the 64-year-
old River Ridge resident said.

LeBlanc was a victim of what has become, in some cemeteries, a
common occurrence: the theft of stone statues, crosses and
vases.

Howard Weiser, sexton for St. Bartholomew and four other Algiers
cemeteries, said 10 or so angels have been stolen in recent
years.

"In the last four or five years, we've been noticing it," Weiser
said."

Last year, at least three people came to Alfortish Inc., which
sells cemetery monuments, to ask about replacing purloined
angels, owner Reuben Alfortish said. More than 20 customers
replaced stolen granite vases, which can cost as much as $400,
he said.

But replacing the monuments, especially the angels, can be
costly. The Gerrets' $125 angel, carved from Italian marble,
would cost thousands of dollars today and would take close to a
year to arrive from Italy.

"I cannot afford to replace that angel, and if I could do it,
would I be throwing good money after bad?" LeBlanc asked.

Joseph Sunseri of Algiers asked himself the same question after
burglars last year stole a 3-foot marble angel from his parents'
tomb at St. Mary Cemetery in Algiers. "I'd be afraid the same
thing would happen," he said.

Metairie Cemetery hired a police officer to live on the premises
and has an elaborate security system and fences to discourage
would-be burglars, said Frank Stewart of Stewart Enterprises,
which owns the cemetery. There have been few thefts there.

But cemeteries more accessible to the public have been targeted
by thieves.

"Since you're open to the public, it's almost impossible to
totally protect" against thefts, said Michael Boudreaux,
director of New Orleans Archdiocesan Cemeteries, which operates
St. Roch, St. Louis and other cemeteries. "As a consequence, we
have to be alert to these situations."

Alfortish said the angels and other stolen monuments are often
sold at bargain prices to people visiting graves - sometimes in
the very cemeteries where they were stolen.

Alfortish was working in Lafayette Cemetery No. 2 when he
overheard a man trying to sell a marble angel to another man
visiting a grave. When the would-be seller went to get the
angel, Alfortish told the visitor that the statue was probably
stolen, and the deal fell through.

On another occasion, he said, one of his customers found an
angel stolen from a family tomb at a flea market on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Old angels are the most vulnerable to theft, Alfortish said.
They're easier to knock loose - angels today are attached with
bolts in addition to cement - and they're more desirable because
they were crafted by hand. Also, the older the grave, the more
likely that relatives who would report the theft have moved
elsewhere or stopped coming.

LeBlanc has given up on recovering her family's angel. But she
hopes her story will prevent similar thefts by alerting the
public to be wary of people selling cemetery statues at cut-rate
prices.