Real IRA victim’s grave is vandalised - again
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Evil vandals have once again wrecked the grave of Real IRA bomb victim David Caldwell - just a day after his partner said the people targeting the monument are “worse” than the terrorists who murdered him.
A father-of-four, Mr Caldwell died on August 1, 2002, from multiple injuries after a booby-trapped lunchbox blew up in his hands at the Territorial Army base in Caw, where he was working as a digger driver.
At his inquest on Tuesday, his partner Mavis McFaul and her 18-year-old daughter heard harrowing evidence about the injuries he sustained - but then returned to his grave yesterday to find pots and flowers stolen and strewn around, in the latest of a series of attacks.
A stone bible was also moved, and today she has appealed to the police and members of the public to help stop the vendetta and let David rest in peace.
Speaking after the former UDR soldier’s inquest, Ms McFaul said that those responsible for the hate campaign - which she is adamant is not sectarian - had hurt her more than the paramilitary bombers.
Ms McFaul first broke her silence on the sustained attacks on the eve of the fourth anniversary of her partner’s murder last year, when she told the North West Telegraph how police had erected CCTV cameras around her remote home for 24-hour surveillance after a number of animals, including two baby lambs, were killed by human hands.
Mr Caldwell’s grave at Ballyoan Cemetery has been repeatedly targeted, with a Father’s Day wreath destroyed and a weed killer or fertiliser substance sprayed over the grass.
But after receiving closure at the inquest, Ms McFaul revealed that the culprits struck again later that night.
“Whatever I said, I stepped on someone’s toes, but I meant every word, the people who are doing this are worse than sick, they are evil and the police should be doing more to stop it,” she said.
“I was dreading going up to the grave and I was right. My daughter Gillian left flowers on Monday, carnations, and they were threw all over the place. She now won’t leave her room, she is crying all the time. She is just going downhill and it is horrible to watch.
“The last time I went to the paper there was a picture of me and her, but they scratched our eyes out and wrote ‘liars’ on it and posted it back through the door. We have no life, we don’t go anywhere, we don’t speak to anyone and our partner and father is dead. Do they not think we have suffered enough?
“David is in his grave and the people who killed him cannot hurt him anymore. But these people are hurting his wee girl, every day, and that is worse.
“I know he is not at the grave, but it is somewhere for Gillian to go, and for them to wreck it like this is evil. She can’t even lay flowers.”
Ms McFaul has urged the police and public to do more to help.
“I have had to insure the headstone and once a group of us guarded it for six weeks,” she said. “The police say they do not have enough evidence to charge people, and I don’t like complaining, but it has to stop, they have to catch these people.
“Even people coming in and out of the graveyard can help - it is a busy place, if someone sees something suspicious, they should ring the police.
“I just can’t hack this. I am not a bad person, but if someone has a problem with me they can come to me and tell me, not torture Davy’s wee girl like this.”
A PSNI spokesman said: “We are aware of Ms McFaul’s complaint. We are treating these incidents very seriously.”
