A man and a woman wanted for vandalizing the gravesite of former President Gerald Ford and former First Lady Betty Ford turned themselves in to police on April 4.
Chris Johnson, 19, of Indiana, identified himself and a girl he had recently met as the perpetrators.
The Grand Rapids Police Department in Michigan sent out an alert after surveillance footage showed two people defacing the grave, which sits outside the Gerald R. Ford Museum, on March 27.
Johnson said he met with police officers on Thursday and turned in a missing metallic letter that he took from the site.
“I’m sorry it happened and I’m sorry I broke it,” Johnson told the Grand Rapids Press. “It wasn’t malicious. I didn’t know what it was and now I’m in the works of trying to fix things.”
The police said Johnson and the woman, who has not been named publicly, came forward and gave statements to a detective.
A police report will be passed on to the Kent County Prosecutor’s Office, which will decide whether to file charges in the case.
Police said initially that the two people committed larceny of U.S. Government Property. According to the Department of Justice, destruction of government property that exceeds $100 can be punished by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
4/4/19 Update: Both subjects seen in the video have come forward and are cooperating with investigators. At the…
Posted by Grand Rapids Police Department on Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Johnson said that he didn’t know that the monument was a grave site or that Ford was a former U.S. president. The site features the phrase “Lives Committed to God, Country and Love,” and Johnson broke off the word “e” in “Committed.”
“I thought it was just part of the park,” he told the press. “(The “e”) was wiggly and the bracket was broken and it came off.”
Museum officials said during the search that what Johnson and his companion did was an extreme act of vandalism.
“The president and first lady are interred here, this is a presidential grave site,” Joel Westphal, deputy director of the museum, told Fox 17. “There are not many presidential grave sites, we are one of only 14 presidential museums around the country.”
The stolen letter cost $400 to replace, museum officials said.
Westphal said that the museum was looking into taking legal actions against the perpetrators.
Gerald Ford was the nation’s 38th president; he served as vice president starting Dec. 6, 1973, after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned. He was then sworn-in as president at 61-year-old following President Richard Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.
He served until early 1977. He ran for re-election but lost to Jimmy Carter.
Besides serving as president and a congressman for 25 years, Ford was an attorney who joined the U.S. Navy in 1942 and was on active duty until 1946.
Ford died in December 2006.
Betty Ford served as first lady while her husband was in office. After divorcing her first husband, she married Ford in 1948. She was mother to four children and a dedicated homemaker and promoted programs for handicapped children after helping them learn how to dance when she was younger.
