DELAWARE COUNTY, Pa. \u2013 The investigation continues as police try to identify remains stolen from Mount Moriah Cemetery in Delaware County, and for some, it\u2019s personal.<\/p>\n
“My family has been buried in Mount Moriah cemetery for over 100 years,\u201d said Drew Techner, a man with family buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery.<\/p>\n
Last week, 34-year-old Jonathan Gerlach of Lancaster was arrested with a bag full of human remains at the cemetery. At his home and storage unit, over a hundred more human remains were found.<\/p>\n
“When I first found out about those body parts being taken out of the vaults, I was just absolutely horrified, and the first thing I thought was, \u2018Is this my family?\u2019” Techner said.<\/p>\n
Techner, also a former Philadelphia police captain, said among those in his family buried at the historic cemetery is someone in a vault.<\/p>\n
“The last that I heard from the Yeadon police department is that they didn’t actually gain entrance into the vault, but they tried,\u201d Techner said.<\/p>\n
Inside that vault are a young man’s remains.<\/p>\n
“This is my family, and it becomes personal,\u201d Techner said. \u201cThese are people; they had lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
And even though those who are buried are gone, they are always remembered and loved.<\/p>\n
“We, as the families, think that when they’re interred in the cemetery, that they’re going to have perpetual peace,\u201d Techner said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s until the unimaginable happens.<\/p>\n
“It’s very disturbing that they’re not resting at peace. That somebody is doing absolute horrible, disgusting things and preventing that from happening,\u201d Techner said.<\/p>\n
In 27 years serving in Philadelphia, Techner said he never saw anything like this. Usually, he says, people go into vaults to find valuables, not remains.<\/p>\n
“It’s something out of a movie \u2014 a bad movie,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He asks that families whose loved one’s remains were violated come together.<\/p>\n
“Prosecution needs to be heavy to send a signal to anybody else that has an idea to do something as heinous as this, that they’re going to have to pay a heavy price for violating these people’s peace,\u201d Techner said.<\/p>\n
He also shed light on the need for additional help and maintenance at Mount Moriah Cemetery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DELAWARE COUNTY, Pa. \u2013 The investigation continues as police try to identify remains stolen from Mount Moriah Cemetery…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[212,42714,41269,42713,41647,41356,69,71,70,3628],"class_list":{"0":"post-85346","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-delaware-county","9":"tag-drew-techner","10":"tag-grave-robbery","11":"tag-human-remains-theft","12":"tag-jonathan-gerlach","13":"tag-mount-moriah-cemetery","14":"tag-philadelphia","15":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","16":"tag-philadelphia-news","17":"tag-police-investigation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}