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  • 2018-04-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Was a Statue Guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Knocked Over by Vandals? (en)
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  • In April 2018, a meme featuring a toppled statue was posted to the Facebook page The Voice of the People with the claim that it was knocked over by vandals near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: This is a genuine photograph of an overturned statue, but the accompanying text is inaccurate. The information contained in this meme was taken directly from a 1 May 2017 (not 2018) Facebook post: This text claims that this photograph was taken at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Veterans Plaza in Longview, Texas. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, however, is located at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. There is a Veterans Plaza in Longview, Texas, but none of the monuments at this memorial carry that name. The Longview Journal, one of the first outlets to report on the statue's fate, noted the mistake in Applewhite's post: The claim that this statue was pushed over by vandals and that those alleged vandals were not young children is also unverified. Local police officers were reportedly investigating the incident as an act of vandalism, but we have encountered no reports about an arrest related to this statue's destruction, nor any photographs or video showing the alleged vandals knocking the statue over. It also appears that the claim that this was an act of vandalism was merely an unverified assumption. We reached out to the Longview Police Department and were told that the investigation was ended due to a lack of evidence: Sergeant R. Shane McCarter confirmed to us that a suspect was never identified but added that the police department believed the statue was intentionally toppled: Although this statue may have truly been vandalized, it's also possible that it was an accident or the inevitable result of a structural weakness: Regardless of how this statue met its demise, it was replaced within a few months: Richard Jurkowski, Executive Director of the Veterans Recognition Foundation, told us in an email that the viral meme was spreading misinformation but insisted that the statue was destroyed in an act of vandalism: (en)
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