Hoons wreck memorial to mum
CALLOUS hoons have torn apart a roadside memorial for a young mother who died in a crash five months ago, leaving her family devastated.
After reports of a burnout party at the site, best friend Hayley McSweeney yesterday described her horror at finding the small white cross, about 50 bunches of silk flowers and other precious mementoes gone from the roadside shrine at Smithfield where her friend Gaby Ernst suffered a fatal seizure driving home on February 22.
A framed photo of a smiling Ms Ernst with her daughters Emme-Rose, 4, and Hannah, 2, was also smashed.
"I just can’t believe someone could be so low as to do that: it doesn’t matter how drunk you are," an emotional Ms McSweeney said.
Ms McSweeney and Ms Ernst’s husband Arthur Ross discovered the damage in Faculty Cl on Saturday morning, just hours after a large group of noisy partygoers had reportedly been in the street doing burnouts.
Police were unable to confirm the reports yesterday.
Mr Ross said his first thought was to quickly put the site back in order before his little girls, who visit several times a week, saw it.
"They would have been quite upset to see it like it was," he said.
"It was pretty distressing for me – just the way it was done, the sheer disregard.
"For me, where there’s sorrow, there’s holy ground."
Ms McSweeney said she walked for miles around the area to see if the vandals had discarded any of the items "but I couldn’t find one flower".
"I’ve got no words to describe how upset I am," she said.
"Everything meant so much to me and they’ve taken it all.
"It’s been there five months and nobody else has touched it; if anything, strangers have put things there because it’s just so sad to see her photo there with her girls."
She said destroying the site would not have been easy, with the cross half-buried and the flowers planted or wired around the base of the tree which Ms Ernst hit.
"They would have literally had to rip them all out of the ground," Ms McSweeney said.
Ms Ernst worked for several years in the hospitality industry and in the classifieds department at The Cairns Post.
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Heartbreak: Emme-Rose Ernst, 4, holds a picture of her mum Gaby at her roadside memorial. The memorial (above) was trashed at the weekend.
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