I want to try to make you understand what you have done.

This is my family’s grave. I want you to know more about them.

This is my Great Grandmother, my Great Grandfather and my Great Aunt in 1915.

This is a family photo in the 1920s. The man in the middle is my Great Grandfather, Risaburo Ebata. He came to Vancouver from Japan over a hundred years ago. He was born 1873 and died in 1930. He had six children, including my Grandmother, Shizue, sitting beside him (his wife is on his other side). He had bought a house for his family to a house on Burrard and Second in Kitsilano. He died suddenly in his 50s.

This was the funeral of a Yada family cousin. Their tall gravestone was luckily not touched by the vandals.

These were my Great Uncles playing around at Kitsilano beach. You see, they were real people.

Here’s my other Great Uncle in the neighbourhood.

The woman beside him in the family portrait is my Great Grandmother, Ima. She also came to Vancouver from Japan over a hundred years ago. She was born in 1879 and passed away in Winnipeg, in 1959. My Grandmother and her brother and sister brought her ashes back to Vancouver in the 1970s.

The third person in the family grave is my Great Uncle, Shigezo. He is in the family portrait, in the middle between my other two Great Uncles. He was born in Vancouver. He died tragically at the young age of 25 years old. He worked at a lumber camp and he drowned after he fell in to the water and was trapped beneath the logs.

The first to die was my Great Grandfather in 1930. The whole family was devastated with his sudden death. My Great Grandmother became a widow with six children.

This was my family at the gravesite after 1932, when my Great Uncle, Shigezo had passed away.

Here is another gathering at the gravesite. My Great Grandmother had lost her husband suddenly in 1930 and then two years later, her eldest son passed away. She was so shocked when she heard the news, she fainted.

This was my Great Grandmother’s funeral in Winnipeg in 1959. She had to move east to Winnipeg after the second world war following the internment of the Japanese Canadians.

This was in the 1970s when my Grandmother, her sister, brother and his wife brought back their Mother’s ashes to Mountain View Cemetary to be reunited with her husband and son.

This was at the grave of another family member whose name I did not know.

This is a blurry photo from the 1970s of my Great Uncle and Great Aunt and other family visiting the family grave.

I am the only family member left living in Vancouver. I have been entrusted to the care of the family grave.

I hope this blog can help you to understand why your crime hurts the Mountain View Cemetary families so much.