By Owen Boss
Staff Writer
Two Montague men were arrested Tuesday and charged with stealing bronze veterans' flag holders from cemeteries in Franklin and Hampshire counties.
Police from Amherst, Montague and Greenfield and state troopers conducted raids at several places Tuesday morning. Arrested were Mark E. Kuklewicz, 32, of 26 Lake Pleasant Road, Lake Pleasant, and Stanley Kuklewicz, 37, of 38 E. Main St., Millers Falls. Both men have been charged with felony larceny and larceny from a grave.
Lt. Ronald Young of the Amherst Police Department, who led the raids, said that so far police have managed to recover 75 of the bronze grave markers.
The two men pleaded innocent to the charges at their arraignments late Tuesday afternoon in Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown.
According to the clerk's office at the Belchertown courthouse, Mark Kuklewicz was held on $750 cash bail and Stanley Kuklewicz was held on $500 cash bail.
Under Massachusetts law (chapter 272 section 73), anyone who steals, or removes, a veteran's grave marker or flag holder, if convicted, can be sent to prison for up to five years. The sentence for felony larceny is also a term of up to five years in state prison.
According to Young, Stanley Kuklewicz was taken into custody at his home in Millers Falls on Tuesday and Mark Kuklewicz was found at a friend's house on Montague City Road.
"The arrests occurred without incident," he said.
At last count more than 200 flag holders had been removed from the graves of veterans in Greenfield, Montague, Deerfield, Sunderland, Hadley, Amherst and South Hadley.
According to a report filed by Amherst Police Detective David Foster, at a meeting Feb. 17, state police told officers from the affected towns that a confidential informant had identified the Kuklewicz brothers as the perpetrators of the cemetery thefts. The informant also told state police the men had sold the flag holders to a scrapyard in the northern Berkshire County town of Florida, off Route 2.
On Feb. 25, Foster stated, Amherst investigators went to Dobbert Recycling, at 19 Mohawk Trail in Florida, and after reviewing the business's financial records were able to locate 74 bronze veterans' grave markers on the owner's inventory, all of which were collected over the last three months.
Also found on that visit, Foster reported, were six cash receipts made out to Stanley Kuklewicz, beginning on Dec. 15 and ending on Feb. 8. A seventh receipt, on Dec. 17, was to Mark Kuklewicz, police said. The plaques stolen from the town of Amherst alone had an estimated value of $1,250.
When reached Tuesday evening, Amherst police declined to give the total amount of the receipts.
Amherst investigators then showed the owner the brothers' driver's license photos, and the owner identified the two men as "regular customers."
Young said police may have no way to match recovered markers to specific graves "unless the family or the funeral homes have marked them in some way."
According to Young, some of the flag holders have been damaged and may be beyond repair.
In Deerfield and Sunderland, police have asked the keepers of local cemeteries to remove all of the bronze markers from the graves of veterans until the matter of the thefts has been resolved.
Some of the people who care for veterans' graves say they will replace the bronze markers with bronze-washed aluminum because the lighter metal has little value on the scrap market.
Other veterans' agents say they think these crimes have been going on for many months and have only become widely known recently.
"I don't know who would accept bronze flag holders as scrap, anyway. To me it's pretty obvious what these things are for - they are from somebody's grave," Greenfield veterans agent Charles Loven said.
Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com
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