Police in Colorado investigate Catholic statue's beheading

Community claims Mormons vandalized San Luis shrine

Dan Elliott | The Associated Press

3/10/2008 -

DENVER — Deputies are investigating allegations that Mormon missionaries might have decapitated a statue of a Mexican martyr and mocked a Catholic shrine in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado.

Photos surfaced on the Internet last week showing young men holding the statue's severed head, preaching from an altar and pretending to sacrifice each other at the Shrine of the Mexican Martyrs.

"The community is sad; it feels they've been victimized," Sangre de Cristo Parish Council spokesman Alonzo Payne said Monday.

Payne said a caption on the Web site said the man holding the statue's head had broken it off. The photos, which were on the picture-sharing site Photobucket, have been removed.

Robert Fotheringham, a regional missions official for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told The Denver Post the three men in the photos were church missionaries. He declined to release their names.

Officials of the Latter-day Saints Church and Photobucket had no immediate comment when contacted by The Associated Press.

The Costilla County Sheriff's Department said an investigation was under way.

Sheriff Gilbert Martinez told the Pueblo Chieftain on Sunday that the investigation could result in charges including desecration of a venerated object, criminal trespass, defacing property and bias-motivated crime.

The outdoor shrine is near the Sangre de Cristo Church overlooking San Luis, a small town 170 miles south of Denver and 10 miles north of the Colorado-New Mexico state line.

It includes the Stations of the Cross, an adobe church called the Chapel of All Saints and the Shrine of the Mexican Martyrs.

It was built by the Sangre de Cristo Parish, which has nine churches and about 450 families across Castilla County.

"You kind of feel hurt when somebody has put that much time and energy for something in such a poor community," said Payne, a San Luis attorney and a member of the parish. "You really felt like you had been damaged personally."

Payne said the date stamp on the photos was 2006, so he believes that's when the incident occurred.

The damage to the statue went unnoticed until a parish member saw the photos last week on Photobucket. When parish members investigated, they found the statue's broken head had been set back on the bust but was loose.

Fotheringham told The Post the incident was "beyond embarrassing. It's inexcusable."

"We have a history of people doing things like this to us so we're mortified that our missionaries would do it to someone else," he said.