Confederate monument vandalized inside Georgia cemetery resulting in $200,000 worth of damages

Authorities in Rome, Georgia, are investigating a recent act of vandalism that caused an estimated $200,000 worth of damages to an 130-year-old statue of a Confederate soldier.

The confederate monument called Rome’s Myrtle Hill Cemetery home for over a century until it was discovered seriously vandalized last week, ABC News reported Tuesday.

“It has been reported, the damage has been estimated and, yes, [we] are investigating,” said Rome Police Department Lt. Danny Story.

Vandals appeared to have breached the cemetery’s grounds late Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning and subsequently smashed the soldier’s face and removed a stone rifle from its hands, according to news reports.

“It looked like it was surgically cut,” City Manager Sammy Rich told The Rome News-Tribune.

The perpetrators went to great length to ruin the statue, a memorial to defenders of the Confederate states, and likely used a ladder and bypassed the cemetery’s locked gates to deface the monument, Mr. Rich said.

“It’s just super disappointing that somebody would go to that much trouble to get up there, put a ladder up or whatever to reach it,” he said.

The statue has since been dismantled while cemetery director Stan Rogers weighs how to restore the monument, ABC News reported.

Mr. Rogers estimated the value of the damaged monument at $200,000, The Rome News-Tribune reported.

The statue at Myrtle Hill was erected in 1887 by the “Women of Rome,” a ladies of association that maintained the graves of Confederate soldiers during the 19th century, according to previous reporting.

At least 1,500 statues, monuments and other “symbols of the Confederacy” could be found on public spaces across the U.S. as of 2016, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Efforts to dismantle those monuments have spiked since last year, however, especially after an Aug. 12 rally held in support of a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee descended into violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” President Trump tweeted in August. “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”

Myrtle Hill Cemetery is south of downtown Rome and about 70 miles northwest of Atlanta, near Georgia’s border with Alabama.