An elderly woman’s funeral took a turn for the worse when her son started a fight with his sister and knocked over his mother’s casket while trying to run over his relatives with his car.
The 36-year-old man, who has not been identified, had been enraged after being uninvited to the services for his mother. His rage resulted in a ‘chaotic altercation’ between eight to 20 members of the same family who were reportedly armed, according to the Richmond Police Department.
The feud broke out between the brother and sister who have not gotten along for ‘many years,’ Sergeant Aaron Pomeroy told SFGATE.
When the sister’s boyfriend tried to break up the dispute, the brother, who reportedly had a stun gun on his person, began beating the boyfriend.
Officers responded to Rolling Hills cemetery in northern California to several 911 reports of a large family fight, and came across a ‘chaotic altercation,’ they said in a release.
At some point during the argument, the brother got into his car with the intention of running over his sister.
Instead, he drove across the grass and gravestones, knocking over and damaging headstones and breaking a water main in the process, which flooded the funeral director’s grandmother’s plot. The flooding also filled his mother’s empty grave.
While driving across the grass the brother struck another woman in her 30s, not his intended target, sending her to the hospital with non life-threatening injuries.
He also managed to knock over his mother’s casket, though her body did not fall out, authorities said.
When the brother got out of his car, a different family member struck him in the head with a cane.
The brother was arrested for felony assault with a deadly weapon and vandalism. Preliminary estimates from the memorial park suggest the dispute caused at least $20,000 worth of damage.
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