The St. Petersburg Times reports on the case of a grave desecration in which a skull was stolen. Turns out it wasn’t practitioners of Santeria, Vodou, Satanism, or any other “occult” religion, it was some stupid kids out for a thrill.

“Nick Macchione wanted the skull. On his knees, he reached inside the broken crypt and felt around the bones and rotting clothes until he grasped it. When he couldn’t get it out, court documents say, his friend Seth McCarty grabbed a chunk of broken concrete and pounded until the heavy lid protecting the old wooden casket gave way.”

According to accounts, the two teenagers were inspired by ghost-hunting web sites that portrayed Spring Hill Cemetery as full of supernatural phenomena and spooky ephemera. Not satisfied with taking pictures or recording audio, they instead went for a “souvenir”. Because of this desecration, and other disturbances at the graveyard, the caretakers want to install new lights, and for the perpetrators to post messages to ghost-hunting web sites reminding people that Spring Hill is private property.

“Alyce Walker, the 82-year-old caretaker of the graveyard, which is tucked back in the woods off Fort Dade Avenue west of Brooksville … is more interested in heading off any more incidents. She is trying hard to get security lights and a gate erected at the site. She wants the heavy weeds and underbrush along the rear fence cleared away. As for Macchione and McCarty, she wants them to go online, to the same sites that drew them to the cemetery, and post messages telling other people that the cemetery is private property and to stay away. She wants to see a printout of their warnings. And she wants it done soon. Halloween is approaching, she said, and that attracts vandals and ghost chasers to the graveyard like moths to a flame. All she really wants, Ms. Walker said, is for people to respect the cemetery.”

No doubt that respectable hunters of the supernatural are horrified by the actions of these teenagers, and will no doubt spread the word that this cemetery is now off-limits to further investigations. After all, it’s only good policy to not insult the ancestors of the very ghosts your trying to hunt is it? As to the incident itself, it is just another sign that when some random desecration or vandalism happens, when animals are killed and discarded in non-ritualistic circumstances, chances are its not a practitioner of the occult at work, but a misguided or disturbed teenager instead.

Remember yesterday when I complained about some apparently secret evidence in a New Jersey case of a grave-robbing, and the subsequent racial profiling of people who “practice Satanic rituals” (ie Santeria and Palo)?

“Capt. Richard Conklin of the Stamford Detective Bureau said Wednesday that police are targeting people of African, Central American, Haitian, Cuban or Caribbean decent who practice satanic rituals as potential suspects in the grave robbing. “We’re starting to look at this as a ritualistic-type incident,” said Conklin … Conklin said evidence recovered at the grave site and in New Jersey indicate the body was taken for ritualistic reasons. For fear of compromising the investigation, he would not go into specifics …”

Well, the police have decided reveal some of the evidence that has them rounding up the usual African diasporic suspects, and it doesn’t exactly paint a convincing picture of Satanic Santeros.

New Jersey police investigators say sacrificed chicken remains were found a quarter-mile from the body of a two-year-old girl taken from her Stamford grave. Sgt. Robert Bracken, a juvenile detective with the Clifton Police Department, said there is still no direct link between a possible ritual and the discovery of 2-year-old Imani Joyner, who died in 2007. Two fishermen found her body Sunday in a sealed garbage bag in the Passaic River, and an investigation led Clifton police to Stamford. Up river in Elmwood Park, authorities also found a bag containing chicken parts and believe them to be part of a sacrificial ritual, Bracken said. “Other towns around us have found sacrificed animals,” Bracken said. “I wouldn’t say it happens every day, but it’s not uncommon either.”

Despite the police admitting there’s no direct link between this grave-robbing and Santeria/Palo, and despite the fact they admit finding sacrificed animals around that area isn’t “uncommon”, and even though Sgt. Bracken said that there was “no evidence of a ritual” found near her body, they are still proceeding with the theory that this is a ritualistic act.

“From all the signs and info we have gathered, that’s where it’s pointed right now,” Conklin said. “If we get other information that points somewhere else, we’ll go that way.” In Clifton, Bracken said police are not narrowly focused on the body theft as a being part of a ritual, but investigators are seeing whether there’s a connection between the obscure beliefs and a motive behind the theft.

At this point they had better hope it was some crazed rogue Santero or Palero digging up what they thought was a “magical” corpse. Because if it turns out to be some run-of-the-mill insane fellow, or disturbed teenagers, the police will have wasted countless man-hours on a racist, religiously discriminatory, and futile line of inquiry. Even if it was a Palero, or some superstitious adherent to Palo, they are handling this in such a way as to damage relations between law enforcement and these religious communities for a long time.