Disturbing Their Peace : Vandals Dig Into Graves of Oceanside Pioneers, but Nothing Is Taken

The dead pioneers had reposed peacefully since 1869 on a forlorn grassyrise overlooking Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside.

Until now.

Somebody crept into the cemetery in darkness and dug open three old graves--one holding a child--then vanished without leaving a sign of having removed anything or anybody.

“I don’t want to be melodramatic about Satanists, but anything is possible,” said Kristi Hawthorne, president of the Oceanside Historical Society. “I’m just appalled by the lack of respect.”

Over the years, vandals have occasionally broken or stolen tombstones or the simple wooden crosses that mark the windy graveyard where the city’s founder, Andrew Jackson Myers, and at least 100 others are buried.

But nothing like this has ever happened.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had someone actually go in and start digging,” Hawthorne said.

Since the crime was reported to Oceanside police Monday, investigators have searched for clues while family members have made pilgrimages to comfort themselves that their dead haven’t been disturbed.

Some have.

Andrew Jackson Myers Jr., the city founder’s son, was only 2 years, 9 months and 23 days old when he died in early 1886. It says so on the boy’s tombstone, right beneath the chiseled form of a little lamb.

One or more vandals shoveled down 3 feet into the child’s grave, stopped for whatever reason, then refilled the hole with loose clumps of dirt and moved on to other resting places.

They ignored the grave right beside the Myers boy. That’s where his sister, Maggie, lies. She died in 1881, age 1 year, 8 months, 18 days. She, too, has a lamb on her headstone.

The children’s father came to this community in 1877 and was a farmer in the fertile San Luis Rey Valley, where the mission and the cemetery are situated. When the railroad came through in 1882, Myers knew the future had arrived, and he hired a surveyor to lay out the streets for the burgeoning city.

But nobody’s sure where he lies in the graveyard because his place is unmarked, and the cemetery has no plot map.

A few yards away from the children’s graves, a gaping 4-foot-deep hole has been hacked into the grave of Mary S. McNeil, who died in 1892 at age 18. Her weathered tombstone was broken off and lodged face up in the desecrated grave.

By the cemetery’s west boundary, which is a tumbledown cyclone fence, a third and unidentified grave has been violated, but the digging was shallow, possibly because the clay-like earth was harder and drier there.

Nobody understands what this crime is really about.

Oceanside Detective Sgt. John Lamb wandered around the cemetery Wednesday, puffing on a pipe and examining the entered graves. He brought a shovel to remove the loose dirt in the Myers’ grave to learn how far down the vandals ventured.

“This is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done,” Lamb said.

Police may never discover the motive for the acts. Nobody has reported seeing any suspects, and no physical evidence has been revealed. Yet, if nothing else, Lamb wants to guarantee that the crime is properly investigated.

“Even if we don’t find anything of evidentiary value, at least we’ll know what happened here,” he said.

Although there’s no proof, it’s doubtful whether any coffin was opened or a body disturbed. Not only was the digging probably not quite deep enough, but time has probably left little to pillage.

In fact, some graves have needed new dirt because they’ve sunk as the bodies and coffins have decomposed and compressed.

“With something that old, the boxes are gone, the people are gone,” said John Daley, a member of the Historical Society who has family roots in Oceanside going back to the turn of the century.

There’s speculation the intruder was seeking valuables thought to have been buried with the bodies.

However, Daley pointed out that any notion of riches would be “just a waste of time” because the ground would have to be painstakingly sifted to find anything. And it’s doubtful that any reward could be found in a child’s grave.

No one is very interested in finding whether any bodies are missing.

Hawthorne, peering into Mary McNeil’s dark grave, said “if she’s still down there, so be it. We should cover it up and let her rest in peace.”

Casting a glance over to young Andrew Jackson Myers Jr.’s nearby plot, she added, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to dig Andrew up to see if Andrew’s still down there. I certainly wouldn’t want to offend family members.”

The first burial there took place in 1869, Hawthorne said, and there have been only sporadic burials in recent years.

“This is an abandoned cemetery, no one runs it,” she said.

Family members make occasional graveside visits to leave flowers or clear away the growth at the 1.4-acre cemetery, where the wind rustles through the weeds and wild grass.

A relative tending graves Sunday discovered the trespass and alerted authorities.

Historical Society members and volunteers cleared away the brush from the cemetery last year, but recent rains have turned the graveyard a shaggy emerald green. It looked sad and forgotten under gathering steel-gray clouds Wednesday.

Once, the cemetery belonged to the San Luis Rey School District, which became part of the Oceanside Unified School District in the late 1950s. Phil Machamer, the district’s director of facilities, maintenance and operations, walked the cemetery and sadly inspected the damage.

“It’s beyond me that somebody would do something like this,” he said. “There isn’t anything for me to say. I guess it’s been going on since the pyramids, robbing graves.”