An employee at an area cemetery has been arrested for allegedly stealing more than 200 brass grave markers and reselling them to a scrap yard.
William Allen Shannon, Jr. was taken into custody on Tuesday and charged with the theft of these newly-forged markers, which vanished from storage closets at Alamance Memorial Park over the course of several months in 2021.
According to the office of Alamance County’s sheriff, the cemetery’s management had originally reported the disappearance of these markers on December 16. But it was only when the sheriff’s office shifted its focus to the cemetery’s staff that it was able to reconstruct what had happened to the missing grave markers.
“Through interviews, scrap yard records, and security system records,” the agency explained in a news release Wednesday, “investigators discovered that the head of maintenance, William Allen Shannon, Jr., was the suspect.”
A 50-year-old white male of 1013 Maple Avenue in Burlington, Shannon has since been charged with felony-level larceny by an employee for his alleged theft of the 209 grave markers, which had been inscribed with the names of the cemetery’s clients. According to the sheriff’s office, these markers had a value of $167,200.
Shannon also faces a second felony-level charge of obtaining property by false pretense for allegedly selling the markers to CMC Recycling for $14,565.13. He has been placed under a $30,000 bond since his arrest.
