Memorial to crash victims stripped

Heather Simonsen drives three times a day to the memorial site where her two sons and their friend died in a horrific car crash.

‘‘I go down there and I talk to my boys, I talk to them and give them a kiss.’’

But when Simonsen visited the site on Cambridge St in Levin yesterday morning, it had been completely stripped bare.

Photos, flowers, notes written by friends and loved ones: all gone.

‘‘I am just distraught – absolutely distraught,’’ Simonsen said

Simonsen’s sons Jesse Hayne and Shand Cotgrove, and their friend Jacob Gray, were killed when their car smashed into a parked truck in the early hours of a Sunday morning in July.

Widespread grief gripped the Porirua community following the deaths. All three were originally from Porirua, and former students at Aotea College.

‘‘They were three good-hearted, beautiful boys,’’ Simonsen said.

After the crash, the site on Cambridge St became a memorial. Flowers, candles, notes to the boys and photos adorned the telegraph pole, and provided a place for family and friends to go to remember the men. It meant everything to Simonsen. ‘‘It is somewhere I can go and sit – there is a park bench ... it is really, really significant to me.’’

Now family and friends just want the most personal, irreplaceable items, such as photos of Shand Cotgrove and his young son, returned.

A family friend alerted Simonsen that the telegraph pole had been stripped after driving past early on Friday morning. ‘‘For me it is the photos, they were personal, they meant nothing to anyone,’’ Simonsen said.

Simonsen said she contacted Horowhenua District Council, and was told its staff did not clear the memorial.

The last time Simonsen visited the site was on Thursday evening, when she added a new memento. ‘‘I bought a little bird you put in pot plants – its wings move in the wind. I remember saying to my boys, you fly and fly high.’’