Thieves add insult to sadness

Angry mum, Shirley Gussey.

Shirley Gussey is angry and she doesn't hold back.

'Your despicable, disgusting, lowlife behaviour will come back to haunt you.”

Shirley's threat is directed at the person who stole a bouquet of flowers from her daughter's grave at Pyes Pa Cemetery.

'If you are stealing the flowers to put on granny's grave or give to your mother for her birthday, then that's disgusting. Not only did they steal the flowers but they took the bloody vase as well.”

And the Tauranga City Council, which administers the cemetery, confirms that's theft.

'If flowers are taken from a grave, it is considered theft” says the TCC manager of parks and recreation, Mark Smith. 'However we rarely get reports of theft, maybe two or three times a year.”

This is one of those times.

Shirley and husband Doug went to the cemetery Sunday morning. They took a bunch of fresh cut flowers to replace the ones already there, the $40 bunch in the purple paper, their daughter's favourite colour. But they were gone. 'And you can guarantee they would have been taken when they were fresh.”

Shirley and Doug lost their daughter in March 2001 to suicide. 'Suzanne was 24, coming up 25.” The pain doesn't get easier, they've just learned to cope with it better. 'It's a bit of a ritual every couple of weeks,” says Shirley after another visit to the Pyes Pa grave. But then on Sunday, the flower theft.

'To say I was a bit annoyed doesn't come close to my real feelings or thoughts. Where does respect begin and end? I wonder how many other people have had things stolen?

'Isn't it bad enough that families have lost loved ones without some halfwit coming along and adding to the sorrow?” Get a job and get a life, suggests the frustrated Omokoroa pensioner.

'We put the flowers at the grave with great feeling and sadness.”

And she says if anyone reading this story received a bouquet of flowers wrapped in purple paper for a special occasion in the past two or three weeks, she is guessing they could have been stolen from her daughter's grave. 'I hoped you enjoyed them because my daughter certainly didn't get to.”

The cemetery is patrolled after it's locked at sunset, seven days a week. Staff are there during work hours Monday to Saturday and a security system monitors the buildings on site.

'Our advice to people leaving flowers and tributes is to make sure that they are well secured” says TCC's Mark Smith. 'Not in high jars or glass jars, as these often get blown over by the wind and smashed. Nine times out of ten the flowers will be fine.”

He says the wind blows a lot of flowers to all corners of the cemetery and these are picked up by the groundsmen. There's no way of knowing which grave they have come from so they are disposed of.

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2 comments

Unbelievable

Posted on 14-05-2017 17:44 | By comfortablynumb

Scum !!


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Posted on 14-05-2017 18:45 | By whatsinaname

Unfortunatly this happens all the time. ...


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