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Frazier
Josh Frazier's headstone was designed with a cannonball. |
Every day is tough for those who miss Josh Frazier, a Spotsylvania County Marine killed by sniper fire in Iraq on Feb. 6, 2007.
On birthdays and holidays, they are keenly aware of his absence.
But this year, June 28, when Josh would have turned 27, was especially painful.
When Rick Frazier arrived at his son's King George grave site at about 7:30 that morning, he found a Civil War cannonball missing from Josh's headstone.
"It breaks my heart," Frazier said. "I can't believe someone would be common enough to come in to a cemetery and steal anything--I don't care if it's a plastic flower. But to steal something off the grave site of a patriotic man or woman, that's the lowest of the low."
Josh's mother, Shelia Cutshall, was at the grave site at Montague Baptist Church on Millbank Road last Wednesday, and nothing was amiss.
"That somebody would desecrate an American hero's permanent resting place is beyond belief," she said. "To discover it missing on his birthday only added more pain to what we were already feeling."
Josh, whose family has a tradition of military service dating to the Civil War, asked that if anything happened to him, a cannonball be included on his headstone.
"It was what he wanted," Cutshall said. "It was a specific request he made, and he had very few requests."
It was so important to the family that when they were designing the very personalized headstone, they brought the cannonball with them and had the carvers create an indentation in the base where it could sit.
Getting the cannonball wasn't easy. Frazier approached Blane Piper, who manages Lee's Headquarters, The Civil War Store, on Deadman's Curve in Fredericksburg. Piper didn't have a cannonball at the time, but found one and presented it as a gift at an organizational meeting for the first Frazier-Mason Some Gave All memorial motorcycle ride.
"I just wanted to do something for them," Piper said, "to thank them for their son."
The cannonball is a locally recovered, 12-pound solid shot, which would have been fired from a Napoleon cannon, "the backbone of both armies' artillery," Piper said.
Frazier put polyurethane on the cannonball to protect it from the weather, and used epoxy to securely fasten it to the divot in the headstone.
Someone had to have pried it from the base.
"I hope it was some kind of prank, but there is no humor in it," Cutshall said. "This was something that's precious to our family."
They don't want to press charges, or even know who took the relic, they just want it back. They're hoping the cannonball will be returned to the grave site anonymously. Members of the family are there at least once a week.
"It's no good to nobody else," Frazier said. "You're not going to take it home and set it on your mantel. You're not going to ride it around in your car. It's just a piece of iron to someone else.
"But it means a lot to me, and it meant a lot to Josh."
Laura L. Hutchison:
Email: lhutchison@freelancestar.com
