Stolen cross turns up in river; returned to rural Jasonville couple

The homemade wooden cross that formerly marked the spot where their 19-year-old son, Justin died in a traffic accident along County Road 500N on Sept. 23, 2007, was returned more than a year after it was stolen from the site.

The couple received a telephone call on Thursday from the Greene County Sheriff's Department telling them that Gary Townsend was walking along the west fork of the White River bank -- near the site of the former Rogers Pit not far from Switz City -- and he found the wooden cross mixed in with some debris.

When he retrieved it, he found that the cross had Justin's name on it and the date of his death.

A relative, Carolyn Sullivan, of Bloomfield, remembered reading something about the stolen cross in the Greene County Daily World and went to the newspaper's Web site and searched the archives to come up with more details about its disappearance.

She then contacted the sheriff's department.

Greene County Sheriff's Department Deputy Terry Wade delivered the weathered cross to the family later in the day on Thanksgiving.

Char Lene Mowery, who works at Greene County General Hospital, says she is relieved the stolen cross honoring the site of her son's death has been returned.

She suspects the cross was placed in the water near Howesville and washed downstream in the June floods.

"We are glad to have it back. It's aggravating that it had to happen. It's (the cross) pretty tattered from being tossed and turned through the river," Char Lene told the Greene County Daily World.

She is not sure what the family is going to do with the cross now.

A friend crafted a new one shortly after it was originally stolen Nov. 2, 2007 and has been erected as a reminder memorial to her son, just like the first one.

"I'm glad it's back. I just hate that people are that disrespectful to do something like this," she said. "I really appreciate the people who were able to find it and fish it out and get it back to us"

It's been a tough personal battle for the family to come to grips with the passing of their son, who was a 2006 Shakamak High School graduate.

Three cases of vandalism have not helped either.

Justin was full of promise and dreams. He was an underground coal miner, who attended Vincennes University -- majoring in aviation and Ivy Tech State College, studying aviation maintenance.

The younger Mowery was riding a 1996 Suzuki GZ 600 motorcycle eastbound on a county road and struck a 2005 Dodge Ram pickup driven by Tonya Wilson Rickert, of Lexington, Ky., in the rear-end. She had parked her truck in the roadway while she was picking up persimmons, according to police investigators.

Apparently, someone or several people don't want the Mowerys to have closure from the death and have vandalized the site of their son's wreck two times since November 2007.

In April, a solor-powered spot light was stolen that was used to illuminate a wooden cross that has been erected as a memorial to Justin at the accident site along County Road 500 North -- not far from the Mowery home.

Several Easter Lilly flowers planted around the cross were also pulled off and some were plucked from the ground entirely.

They had tried to remove the replacement cross, but weren't successful that time.

She pointed out that some of the destroyed flowers were planted by the family of the woman who parked the truck in the road that caused her son's death.

Also, Justin's grave site at Lebanon Cemetery at Midland has not been immune from a similar kind of thoughtless encroachment. Char Lene says there are fresh tire marks around her son's tombstone that were laid down also in April.