{"id":3767,"date":"2014-09-16T06:15:24","date_gmt":"2014-09-16T12:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=3767"},"modified":"2014-09-16T15:12:15","modified_gmt":"2014-09-16T21:12:15","slug":"mystery-of-found-tombstone-quickly-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/09\/mystery-of-found-tombstone-quickly-solved\/","title":{"rendered":"Mystery of tombstone found in river is quickly solved"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Headstone\"<\/a>

Photo courtesy of Mike Penfold<\/p>

This tombstone was found Saturday during the annual Yellowstone River Cleanup. Thanks to a local Facebook page, the widow of the man whose headstone it was may be able to retrieve it as early as Tuesday.<\/p><\/div>\n

This story has been updated, in a postscript.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The power of social media was on display in Billings Monday, when users of a Facebook page quickly solved the mystery surrounding a tombstone found in the Yellowstone River.<\/p>\n

The granite headstone was found Saturday during the eighth annual Yellowstone River Cleanup. A group of Rocky Mountain College students found the headstone near Duck Creek Bridge, on dry cobblestone near the water\u2019s edge, and hauled it by boat to Norm\u2019s Island, a few miles downstream.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Merry Ann Peters, who was walking her dogs on the island Sunday, came across the tombstone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI almost started crying,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was the saddest thing I ever saw.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peters is a member of the Yellowstone River Parks Association, so she called another member to see if he knew anything about it. He steered her to the Facebook page of Mike Penfold, the volunteer field program director for Our Montana, which works on Yellowstone River conservation issues.<\/p>\n

Penfold had taken part in the cleanup Saturday and posted a video of the tombstone being unloaded at Norm\u2019s Island, as well as a picture of the tombstone.<\/p>\n

About 4 p.m. Monday, Peters posted Penfold’s photo of the tombstone on another Facebook page, the Billings Customer Service Watchdog Group<\/a>. The page usually deals with comments on restaurants and stores and such, Peters said, but she went to it\u00a0looking for help because \u201cpeople post all kinds of weird stuff there.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was quickly flooded with comments, and several people found an obituary<\/a> to match the headstone, showing that it was a memorial to Edward E. Ahlquist, Aug. 5, 1940-April 25, 2003. His obituary said he and his wife, Jane, \u201cbuilt, owned and operated the Red Boxcar Drive-In in Red Lodge from 1972 to 1979.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the right side of the headstone it read: \u201cJane I. Jan. 27,\u201d with the year obscured or weathered away, and no death date, indicating the man’s wife was still alive.<\/p>\n

Barely an hour after Peters posted the photo and a plea for help, she heard from Lyndsay Van Steenburgh, who lives across the street from Jane Ahlquist in central Billings. Van Steenburgh said she was at her computer when a notification from the consumer watchdog Facebook page popped up on her news feed.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>As soon as she read about the tombstone, Van Steenburgh ran across the street to see if her neighbor was the Jane Ahlquist in question. She wasn\u2019t home, but Van Steenburgh saw another neighbor who knows Jane much better, and he told Van Steenburgh that, yes, the tombstone was for Jane and her husband and had been stolen a year earlier.<\/p>\n

According to the Find a Grave<\/a> website, Ahlquist had been buried in the Yellowstone Valley Memorial Park at 3605 Grand Ave.<\/p>\n

Van Steenburgh said she subsequently found out that Jane Ahlquist had been in Seattle and was planning to fly back into Billings later Monday night. She also said that a neighbor with a pickup was planning to drive down to Norm\u2019s Island with Jane Ahlquist on Tuesday to retrieve the headstone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine if it was my husband,\u201d Van Steenburgh said, \u201cso I\u2019m really happy for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Van Steenburgh said family members \u201chave their suspicion on who it was\u201d who stole the tombstone. \u201cI\u2019m not going to say who,\u201d she added. \u201cThat\u2019s not my place.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one has suggested there’s a connection, but the man accused of killing the son of Jane and Edward Ahlquist in March 2013 was finally arrested just a month ago. The Ahlquists’ son, Frank \u201cTrey\u201d Greene, was gunned down outside a house on the far West End of Billings.<\/p>\n

On Aug. 14, Patrick O. Neiss pleaded not guilty<\/a> to a charge of deliberate homicide in connection with the murder.<\/p>\n

Luke Ward, director of Environmental Policy Management at Rocky, was with the students who found the headstone Saturday. He was in drift boat used for transporting debris when the students waved him over to shore just downstream of the Duck Creek Bridge. He said none of them could imagine how the tombstone ended up where it did.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat thing is super heavy,\u201d Ward said. \u201cIt took four of us to get it up in the air.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ward said the river cleanup was \u201ckind of a crazy one\u201d this year. They also found a canoe near the city\u2019s water treatment plant, and Ward himself found six shirts still on their hangers. The students who found the headstone also saw a bear not far from Duck Creek, Ward said.<\/p>\n

Josie Shirek, the administrator of the year-old watchdog Facebook page where Peters posted her plea, said she had never seen anything quite like it on her site, either.<\/p>\n

She jumped onto the comment threat to say how happy she was that the owner of the tombstone had been found.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father died a few years ago and his headstone went missing and then the flowers on it continue to get destroyed,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In a message to Last Best News, she added, \u201cIt was quite remarkable to read the comments and see our community of members help find the owner of such a significant item.\u201d<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>:\u00a0Tuesday afternoon, YRPA members Roger Williams and Don Wirth picked up the headstone at Norm\u2019s Island and took it to Jane Ahlquist\u2019s house. From there, according to Ahlquist, they all went to Billings Monument, where she hoped the tombstone could be refurbished.<\/p>\n

Ahlquist said the tombstone was stolen sometime before Memorial Day 2012, after which she had another made at Billings Monument. She said the family was pretty sure who had done it, and when the original headstone was found this week, her kids told her to hang onto the new one.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said I should keep it for a spare in case the guy steals it again,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

All joking aside, she said she and her children were very happy to have it back. She said her first thought was to refurbish the old headstone and donate the new one to a needy family after having the engravings on it ground off.<\/p>\n

But even if the old one can be restored, she said, the monument company told her it would be more costly to reuse the new one than simply to buy another. So it looks as though she really will have a spare headstone.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe I\u2019ll put it the garden or something,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story has been updated, in a postscript. The power of social media was on display in Billings Monday, when users of a Facebook page quickly solved the mystery surrounding a tombstone found in the Yellowstone River. The granite headstone was found Saturday during the eighth annual Yellowstone River Cleanup. A group of Rocky Mountain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3765,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[1334,1338,1336,1335,790,1337,333,1332,1333],"class_list":["post-3767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","category-news","tag-edward-and-jane-ahlquist","tag-frank-trey-greene","tag-luke-ward","tag-merry-ann-peters","tag-mike-penfold","tag-patrick-o-neiss","tag-rocky-mountain-college","tag-yellowstone-river-cleanup","tag-yellowstone-river-parks-association","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}