Some 49 headstones were knocked over and damaged at the St. Michael Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Dundalk last week just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was about to begin, church officials said Sunday.
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Baltimore County Police are investigating the vandalism, said Sgt. Gladys L. Brown, a spokeswoman for the department.
Brown could not say whether the incident is being investigated as a hate crime, but the timing is difficult to ignore, said cemetery administrator Stephen Humeniuk. He received a call from a neighbor of the cemetery Wednesday alerting him to the damage, just hours before Russia began attacking Ukraine.
“The first thing you think is a hate crime, but you can’t prove it,” Humeniuk said. There was no note, he added. “There was no spray paint. Nothing to indicate that. It was just the timing of the incident and the crisis in Ukraine.”
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“I thought to myself: ‘What else could go wrong?’？” said Humeniuk, who serves on the church council for St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church in Baltimore, which operates the cemetery.
The damage was concentrated in a back corner of the cemetery, he said, relatively far from the road. Dozens of headstones were toppled, and some of them cracked as a result. Some adornments on the stones were shattered.
“To me, it was unprecedented and it was intentional and it was a hate crime — I’ll say it,” church trustee John Wojtowycz said.
On Sunday, family members surveyed the damage.
“We heard about the desecration of the cemetery earlier this week, and a number of us just wanted to go out there and see,” said Bohdan Oleksiuk, whose parents and grandparents are buried there. “It’s just so many headstones.”
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His family’s headstones were not damaged, but others weren’t so lucky. Dressed in a long black coat, Ola Kulnich stood near the cemetery fence, looking at her brother’s headstone, which had toppled backward, severed from its base.
“It’s been a tough week,” Oleksiuk said. “And it’s not going to get any easier.”
Loeblein Memorials, located close to the cemetery, has offered to repair the damaged stones at no cost. The company, a division of Tegeler Monument, placed many of the headstones in the cemetery, said company president Walter Tegeler.
“The families — a lot of them — are all gone, so there’s no one to look after them,” Tegeler said of the headstones. “Most of them are going to be fixed relatively simply.” But any headstones shattered into multiple pieces may be beyond repair, he said.
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The cemetery is not open to the public and is protected by a locked gate, Humeniuk said, but there was a hole in its fencing. Church officials had patched previous holes, which they believed were created by children aiming to cut through the cemetery on their way to a middle school close by. Now, the church is looking into installing security cameras on the premises, Humeniuk said.
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Sunday morning, a Baltimore County police officer contacted Humeniuk to say that investigators planned to search for fingerprints on the stones, he said. Now, Humeniuk is trying to notify as many affected families as he can.
“Unfortunately, the cemetery’s been there since the 1950s, and a lot of the headstones that were affected were some of the original headstones when the cemetery first opened, so the families are long gone,” he said.
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Though his parents emigrated to the United States in the years following World War II, Humeniuk still has several cousins in Ukraine. The messages from one of his cousins in western Ukraine, recounting the family’s experience, have been chilling.
“Thank God the bombs are not falling yet,” one message read. “But fear exists. People are scurrying into stores and banks in fear of what’s to come.”
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“You feel helpless,” Humeniuk said.
Huge explosions lit up the sky early Sunday south of the capital, Kyiv, where people hunkered down in homes, underground garages and subway stations in anticipation of a full-scale assault by Russian forces. Russia has said its attack is aimed only at military targets, but bridges, schools and residential neighborhoods have been hit. Hundreds of Ukrainians and Russians have died, according to Ukrainian officials.
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Humeniuk said support from the community in Baltimore has provided a much-needed lift to the church, located just south of Patterson Park. As he lingered outside St. Michael on Sunday morning while a service was underway, several passersby approached him to offer support and asked where they could direct donations.
The church plans to accept offerings through its website, Humeniuk said. The response to a recent fundraising pierogi sale was so overwhelming that many would-be customers were placed on a waitlist, according to the church’s Facebook page.
“Due to the overwhelming response and outpouring of support, we received an overabundance of orders and therefore cannot take anymore,” the post read.
Sunday morning at the church, after a supportive visit from William Lori, the Catholic archbishop of Baltimore, parishioners boarded a bus bound for a Washington rally in support of Ukraine.