CONVERSE, Texas – The broken military headstones discovered in a Converse field were found to belong to service members buried at Ft. Sam Houston National Cemetery.
Tracy and Clint Davidson made the discovery while walking the field behind their home.
“We found a bunch of military headstones, on piles, like garbage. It made me cry. I didn’t think it was right,” Tracy Davidson said.
The coupled said they tried to reach someone in the military for help, but when no one responded, they called KSAT.
“Hopefully, someone can get some answers here and clean it up,” Clint Davidson said. He thinks there’s a logical explanation to why they were abandoned there.
Some of the names were linked to Ft. Sam Houston National Cemetery. Director Frieda Robinson quickly answered KSAT’s call and showed us where the service members on the names found were buried on the property. She reassured us there was no vandalism that took place, but the headstones were removed from the cemetery some 20 years ago.
“The issue is the disposal of these markers when the time came, when the replacement came in,” she said.
Robinson believes the contractor or cemetery workers back then tossed the headstones onto the field.
They were “from the mid-1990's. Because of these type of issues forward, our instructions are to take out the old headstones, replace it with the new one and either place the old in the grave site or we break them up in such fine quantity so we can destroy them by throwing them away in a proper disposal,” Robinson said.
The headstones found in the Converse field only had the service members’ names. The ones in the cemetery had wives’ names added. Many of them died in the early 1990’s.
Robinson said they would follow up with the Davidsons to pick up the headstones and make sure they are properly disposed of to avoid this confusion in the future.
“We hope and pray we don’t have this occur again, but if it does, people can call us and we will go out and find out what's going on. We will retrieve of them and properly dispose of them,” Robinson said.
Those who have questions about their service members’ remains buried in a national cemetery or who find military headstones can call 210-820-3891.