Cornish family 'devastated' after vandals trash father's memorial

The family of a man who died at the age of 39 have been left devastated after his memorial was trashed by vandals.

Lee Curtis was well known in Roche, Cornwall, before his death in 2008.

Since then, his children have made regular visits to a tree at the local cricket club, leaving handwritten letters, card and ornaments to remember him by.

However, just a few weeks ago, Lee's son Sean, 30, went down to the memorial and found it had been destroyed.

Sean's wife, Rachel, 31, said: "Sean was absolutely devastated, crying, not really able to tell me what was going on. He was just holding the stuff that was broken, that he’d picked up.

“He has been devastated ever since, he hasn’t really been able to talk about it. He can’t believe why somebody would do it, how somebody could do it.

“It was quite clear it was a memorial, whether they knew his dad or not."

She added that the vandalism was particularly upsetting because some of the tributes left at the memorial had been written by Sean's brother Nathan, who died in 2019.

"The hard part of it is that his brother put stuff there - handwritten letters, Father’s Day cards, sports stuff, and of course we can’t replace that.

“He’s not here now to put anything else down for him and that’s extremely hard to come to terms with," Rachel said.

The family had left plants, ornaments, cards, letters and even key-rings around the tree, in Lee's memory. Now, hardly anything remains.

Rachel added: "So much is missing that you don’t know whether they’ve stolen it, whether they’ve just thrown it away.

"We know that items were burnt but we don’t know what items were burnt, so there are still a lot of items missing and we don’t know where they are."

"If anyone knows where these items were that were around the tree, could they please put them back?

"Anonymously is fine, but if we could just have one thing back that Nathan put down, it would just mean the absolute world to us."

The family is now fundraising for a space in the memorial garden at a local cemetery, which is expected to cost over £5,000. The fundraiser can be found here.