Broward County Sheriff(PARKLAND, Fla.) — Two people have been arrested for allegedly stealing items from the mass shooting memorial at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, officials said.
Michael Shawn Kennedy, 37, and Kara O’Neil, 40, were arrested Sunday after witnesses told authorities they saw them “willfully and knowingly deface and remove monument items” on school grounds and on fencing around the school, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office said.
Items from the memorial were found in their car, including teddy bears, plaques and pinwheels, the sheriff’s office reported.
The memorial sprung up in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass shooting in Parkland, where accused gunman Nikolas Cruz killed 17.
Kennedy, of Hollywood, Florida, and O’Neil, of Fulton, New York, were each arrested for removing or disfiguring a tomb or a monument, the sheriff’s office said.
They were both ordered held on $1,000 bond on Monday, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Stoneman Douglas student Carmen Lo, whose best friend, Carmen Schentrup, was one of the 17 killed, wrote on Twitter, “How disrespectful can you be to do this? This is disgusting. First my friends are robbed of life less than 200 feet away from this memorial and now people won’t even let them Rest In Peace? MY FRIENDS ARE GRIEVING and these people are looking for gains.”
The City of Parkland wrote in a Facebook post Monday that the “delicate process of archiving and memorializing items that have been placed around Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School will begin soon.”
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