Grave robbery
Mother pleads for return of pounamu from headstone
Afamily are grieving after thieves stole a precious chunk of greenstone bolted to a headstone.
The pounamu — a taonga for the family — was taken from Isachaar Smith-Craig’s grave at Mangaroa Cemetery near Hastings before Christmas.
It was there for only about a week before it was stolen.
Isachaar was the youngest of Teresa Smith-Craig’s six children when he was born at the end of January 2000. But just before he turned 1 he came critically close to death after crawling into the pool of their Hastings home.
He survived but suffered severe brain damage. He was wheelchairbound, unable to walk, talk, eat or fend for himself.
Neither Smith-Craig nor the rest of the wha¯ nau minded though, because Isachaar was alive, breathing. That’s all they cared about.
She said his survival brought the family closer together, taught them about compassion, love and to be grateful they each had all their “bits and pieces”. However, a chest infection would eventually knock him down. He died aged 7 in April 2007.
Smith-Craig said she bought each of her children a greenstone when they turned 18, but for Isachaar she had to do something different.
She asked a Canterbury friend to find her a pounamu she could put on his grave. He walked in a local river, praying and thinking of Isachaar.
After three hours he put his hands in the water and found a giant greenstone rock. He carried it for three hours to bring it out.
Smith-Craig had the taonga below her son’s photo which sat on the mantelpiece of their home. They
would rub it, and say Isachaar’s name, pray for him and share stories.
She wanted to put it on his headstone, but her mother didn’t want her to, saying it would only get stolen.
“But the friend who got it for us, got it for his grave. I thought, he’s 18 now, I better do this because it was a gift for me to do that.”
She kept it at home for a couple of years before late last year deciding to get it fixed to her son’s grave.
The company who made the headstone agreed to fix it in place, drilling two bolts through the stone, setting it in place, coincidentally on the day of his near-drowning 18 years earlier.
Feeling satisfied, Smith-Craig went to Wellington for a relative’s 40th.
She spoke to her daughter the day before she got back and was asked whether she had got it installed yet. The alarm bells rang. Arriving back the Sunday before Christmas, she visited Isachaar’s grave to find the greenstone gone.
“It’s pretty heart-wrenching . . . who could do that? It was bolted down with two big holes in it . . . I got it done properly because I knew that it was a great piece of greenstone.”
She described her friend’s long walk through the river as a spiritual experience and she now felt sorry for him and all the effort he’d put in.
“I feel quite sorry for the person that’s stolen it because you can’t do that, because it’s Ma¯ ori. Karma will come back on them really badly.”
She received the invoice for the greenstone installation on Saturday.
“I haven’t even paid for it yet . . . so that made me cry and another new year made me cry because it’s his birthday at the end of the month. It’s really upset all his family, too.”
She’s pleading with the thieves to return the greenstone to their family.
“Just put it back, I mean it’s probably too late for them now anyway, the boogie man is probably walking around with them right now, but just give it back.”