Twenty-one American flags were found burned at a cemetery in Anderson, South Carolina, according to the funeral home that runs it.
Owner Jess McDougald says his family has never seen anything like it in McDougald Funeral Home’s 85 years of operation.
The funeral home has been run by the same family for three generations, since McDougald’s grandfather started it, and he says they put out American flags during patriotic holidays.
“We’ve put flags out for as long as I can remember,” McDougald said. “We’ve never had a problem.”
The flags lined the road to the veterans section of the cemetery on the evening of July 3: about 30 of them, 4 feet by 6 feet in size, fixed to 8-foot poles.
But when cemetery staff arrived for work July 5, they found poles in a pile with the burnt remains of 21 flags.
McDougald says they called the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating.
He says they have no idea who might have burned the flags, but he’s glad the fire didn’t spread to the rest of the cemetery.
