Gravestone falls and traps 3-year-old girl

By JOHN QUINN
Union Leader Correspondent

SOMERSWORTH — A game of hide-and-seek in a cemetery ended with a 3-year-old being pinned under a 500-pound gravestone Wednesday morning.

Police and firefighters responded at 10:41 a.m. after receiving a report that a girl was trapped under a gravestone in Forest Glade Cemetery near Maple Street, according to Fire Lt. Kenneth Vincent.

Vincent said the child was walking in the cemetery with a caretaker and a few other children.

Police Capt. Russ Timmons said it appears the children were playing, and two may have been hiding behind the gravestone. He said it is possible the gravestone toppled as the two kids “were looking over the top of it.”

Police did not release the name of the girl or those involved in the incident.

Timmons said the girl was lucky that the contours of the ground helped prevent the gravestone from causing more serious injuries, even though her leg was pinned under it.

“It landed on an angle,” Timmons said.

“It was an old gravestone,” Vincent said, adding it took four people — two officers and two firefighters — to lift the grave marker and free the girl.

As a precaution, Vincent said ambulance crews from American Medical Response transported her to Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover.

Timmons noted that some gravestones have been in place for a long time, and that they can be eroded by the elements.

Although the city maintains the cemetery, officials will have to look into how to initiate the process to repair the overturned gravestone, Tom Willis, director of Somersworth’s Public Works Department, said.

“Tombstones are the property of descendants of the deceased unless they (the graves) are abandoned or (the relatives) can’t be located,” Willis said.

“It’s a case-by-case basis,” he said.