Editor, Manteca Bulletin,

A dear friend of mine just had to go through a horrendous tragedy of losing her newborn baby girl.

 Unless you have lived through this kind of pain of losing a child, to the rest of us there are absolutely no words or feelings that can ever come close to what they feel. She laid her baby to rest on October 8, 2015 at Park View Cemetery in French Camp/Manteca. When I went to visit the grave a couple of days later, my friend and her family had Aira’s grave site completely decorated with beautiful flowers and a temporary statue of an angel (until her headstone came in) with a tiara topping the Angel. I know from experience that adding decorations to a grave site can bring that little sense of comfort to such sad circumstances.

I spoke to my friend a couple days ago and she was looking forward to decorating her baby’s site for Halloween. Just this past Sunday, Oct. 18, she had completely decorated baby Aira’s site, with everything cute for Halloween. Not even a full 24 hours later, my friend returned to her baby’s grave site only to find that every single decoration had been stolen! She rushed to the front office asking if they had anything to do with these missing decorations, but they did not. Some heartless person came, not only to a cemetery which is a sacred place as is, but to the child and baby section of the cemetery and stole every piece of decoration from this baby’s grave site including the Angel statue.

I cannot even begin to understand the reasoning behind this heartless and coward act of evil. I’m sure this is not the first time this has happened, just in May my mother got her car broken into and purse stolen right in front of her while she was visiting her son’s grave. Sure there are cameras as you enter the park, but the fact that these acts keep occurring and nothing is being done about it is simply inexcusable. Why isn’t anything being done? How is this cemetery allowing these horrendous acts to continue? Something needs to be done, and people that have family/ loved ones buried at this cemetery need to be aware of these acts that frequently occur there. I am calling out to you, Park View Cemetery, what are you going to do?



Desiree Dingle

Manteca