Mum’s heartbreak as yobs smash her daughter’s grave
GRIEVING WOMAN CATCHES BOYS VANDALISING SIX-YEAR-OLD GIRL’S PLOT
A MUM has spoken of her devastation after she caught a group of young thugs smashing up her young daughter’s grave.
Emma Chester’s daughter Lexi died aged six in September last year from numerous complications caused by a heart attack she suffered when she was just three-months-old.
She is buried at Peel Green Cemetery in Salford, and Emma visits her grave – which she has decorated with toys, flowers and a white cross – every day.
When she arrived on Wednesday with her 16-year-old son Jake, she found three young boys understood to be just 11 years old, smashing up her precious daughter’s grave.
Emma said: “It was pure chance that I arrived when I did. I had been going to go in the morning, and then I was too busy around the house.
“As I was pulling up I saw these kids and I said to my son, ‘Are they near our baby?.’
“They were trampling all over her grave and trying to rip the cross out of the ground.
“One of my friends who works at the cemetery had put it in for me, so it was properly rooted in the ground, but they were swinging on it and had pulled it right over.
Lexi had a big set of artificial flowers with her name written in them, and they had completely smashed that up.
“She also had a unicorn money box that her sister put a penny in every time she visited her, and they had smashed that and taken the money. There can only have been about £4 at the most in there. “They caused so much damage, it was horrendous.” Emma, who is also mum to Kendal, 14, Mason, 12, and Ellie, 10, said she and her family has been left ‘in shock and heartbroken’ by the attack. She and Jake chased the culprits and caught one of them, who they took to the crematorium where they called the police. “The police officers were disgusted by what had happened,” she said. “One of them came to see the damage that had been done to the grave.
“I just want the kids who did this and their parents to know what they have done.”
Emma spent all of Thursday morning replacing the items that were broken and working to restore her daughter’s resting place to its former glory.
“She stands out because her resting place is so colourful and well looked-after,” she added.
“People are in awe of how well she is cared for.
“It shows how much she is loved by her parents and siblings.”
A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police confirmed officers attended the scene, and inquiries are ongoing.
Anyone with information is asked to call 101, quoting incident number 1542 of July 26, or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.