A man has been arrested for allegedly urinating and defecating on his ex-wife’s grave, WABC reports. He was first noticed by a witness, who said they saw him at the Tappan Reformed Church Cemetery in Tappan, New York, and he was later allegedly caught on film by a family member of the deceased.
This behavior allegedly started in April when Lisa Torello’s family said they noticed deli bags of feces around her gravestone, a TikTok video of local news coverage reports.
Michael Andrew Murphy, Torello’s son, and his siblings were understandably disturbed, though they assumed the culprit was a forgetful dog walker or owner. But after they found the bags again, they realized the intent behind the act was allegedly much more malicious.
“We contacted the police. They came and took a report and they said, ‘Okay if you find another one let us know,'” Murphy said in the video. “So we found another one a couple of weeks later, again.”
Murphy and the family then decided to take matters into their own hands. After getting the go-ahead from the cemetery, they installed security cameras around the facility to catch the man. This did the trick — the family said they caught a man arriving at the cemetery early in the morning for four days in a row.
After security cameras confirmed someone was desecrating his mother’s grave, Murphy set up a camera right next to Torello’s gravestone. That captured a closer look at the man, who Murphy said is Dean Eichler, Torello’s ex-husband, to whom she was briefly married to in the 1970s.
In the footage, Eichler allegedly is seen desecrating Torello’s gravestone while a person believed to be his current wife appears to wait in a car parked beside him.
“There’s been no contact since ’76,” Murphy explained. “I know they were married for a year [and] they had a bad breakup.”
According to WABC, it was a bad breakup indeed. Eichler left Torello when she got pregnant because he didn’t believe the child was his. But DNA testing proved that he was mistaken.
Torello and Eichler’s daughter, Renee Barragan, is horrified by her biological father’s actions.
“It’s heartbreaking to have this happen,” Renee Barragan said, according to ABC13.
Torello died five years ago, and Eichler has had no recent contact with her family.
“No one in my family has had contact with him since 1976 or so,” Murphy told Daily Voice. “We’re not sure how he found my mother’s grave.”
Neighbors believe the allegedly disgruntled ex lives in Bergenfield, New Jersey, and works in the deli section at a major chain in Tenafly, New Jersey. Police tracked him down and found him in Bergenfield.
For Murphy and the rest of Torello’s children, this is all about getting justice for their mother.
“We just wanted justice, I could care less about these cameras, I could care less about any of that stuff, we just feel like we want to get justice, that’s it,” he said, according to ABC7.
According to Daily Voice, cemetery desecration is a crime in New York state, if damages exceed $250. This is indeed the case for Torello’s grave.
Murphy has paid a hazmat company to “remove all her decorations that are soaked in urine,” Daily Voice reports. He’s also sought to have her headstone properly cleaned and for the surrounding grass to be ripped up and replaced.
“It’s been hard to sleep. I’ll start to fall out and suddenly I wake up,” Murphy told Daily Voice. “I don’t care who you are. This has to make you sick. This happening to our mother … it’s horrible.”
