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The lovingly placed tributes to those killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High were about to be archived and memorialized by the city of Parkland when vandals struck.
Deputies found in the back seat of a car late Sunday night an assortment of teddy bears, plaques, pin wheels and other tokens of remembrance stolen from the fence along the school grounds.
Witnesses told police they saw Michael Shawn Kennedy, of Hollywood, and Kara M. O’Neil, of Fulton, N.Y., pilfering cherished items from the campus memorial, created in the aftermath of the shooting that killed 17 students and staffers and injured 17 others on Feb. 14.
“I’m kind of speechless,” said Sari Kaufman, a 15-year-old sophomore who shared classes with shooting victim Alyssa Alhadeff, 14. “I know that memorial has helped us all cope.”
“That whole monument is just to honor [those who died],” she said. “It’s kind of like stealing from them, their families and our whole community.”
Kennedy, 37, and O’Neil, 40, were arrested Sunday on suspicion of removing or disfiguring a tomb or a monument, a felony offense, and on Tuesday morning, were still behind bars in Broward County jails.