This is the first of a five-part series
Compton/Carson, CA (The Bulletin) – Aisha Woods is the gatekeeper of the privately-owned Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery, which sits just across the street from Woodlawn Celestial Gardens, a historic cemetery in Compton.
The interesting thing to note about both burial places is that Woodlawn is on Compton-owned land, whereas Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery was annexed to the City of Carson.
The distinction that the two places have is that they have been heavily vandalized in recent years. An example of these morbid atrocities is the number of incidents that have taken place in just one year at Lincoln.
According to Woods, since February 2024, Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery has seen 110 markers and 78 headstones removed. The chief reason for the thefts is the minerals within the headstones and markers, Woods told The Bulletin.
The main ingredient that the markers and headstones share that makes them a target for thieves is bronze, Woods said.
As it is, a headstone can be worth from $400 to $600 to a buyer, with a middleman can rake in as much as $1,000, she added.
While there have been a ton of incidents at Lincoln, Woods admitted that since the implementation of cameras at the cemetery, the number of thefts has gone down.
“From what I understand, from what a detective has said it’s like a crime ring…the bronze is higher for the buyer,” Woods said. “So, how they said was, the thieves will get a bunch of the headstones because it’s more valuable with more than one, so they will go ahead and sell it to a buyer, either recycling place or a buyer, and that buyer will pay them either $400 to $600 for like several of them. So that’s why they’re grabbing them at a cluster instead of individually. So they’ll probably get $600 or $700 for five or six of them, and then the middleman will actually get $1,000 to the next person that they’re handing it off to.”
Woods says that while most of the crimes committed can usually take place late at night, there was one morning last year when she busted a thief trying to haul off a pallet full of headstones in the morning just after sunrise. So there is no real time when these thieves will invade the cemetery.
“I think that we were being watched,” Woods said. “I think that some of my assumptions are that whoever was stealing the headstones at the time were local. But we do get a lot of traffic. There’s a lot of traffic down Central [Avenue] 24 hours. So there’s people on bikes. There’s people on, you know, there’s people that actually hop the gate at, I mean, hop this wall at night and cross over to go to the nursery across the street. So we’ve had times where we had to run people out at nighttime.”
The sacredness of the burial grounds at Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery includes celebrities, members of the military, musicians, and other notable leaders. As you stroll through Lincoln, you see a good number of places where headstones used to sit before they were removed. The same goes for the mausoleum.
Large plastic bags with tape cover the upright headstones that have been ripped from their permanent homes. It is an uncanny and ghastly sight to behold.
“Everybody has the same disdain with the idea of people’s marker, their markers, or even disturbing of the dead, and especially the families that have come across, their families, loved ones, headstones being removed,” Woods went on to say. “And it’s heartbreaking, it’s disturbing. It’s like opening another wound, because it’s like you’re stealing from me.”
Up Next: Vandalism at Woodlawn Celestial Gardens
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