'Why would anyone do this?'

Victor Rakich with a tray of potted colour - not as complete as it was before someone helped themselves - for his parents' graves. Photo / Peter Jackson

Victor Rakich gave up trying to understand where the world was going some time ago. He is no nearer finding an answer since someone started stealing plants from his parents' graves.

"Why would anyone do this?" he asked last week after pansies were taken from the plastic tray he had put there a few days earlier.

"Don't these people, whoever they are, have a heart?"

Rakich takes very good care of his parents' final resting place at the Kaitaia cemetery. His father, Ivan, died in 1993, and his mother, Zorka, in 2012, but they are never far from his thoughts. He visits them three or four times a week, and regularly buys small flowering plants for them. And now someone has begun stealing them.

They don't take whole trays, but pull plants out of them, leaving others behind. They had also started stealing plants from from another grave nearby, leaving gaps in their containers.

Rakich hesitated to describe what was happening as theft, but was distressed that someone would show such little respect for others, the living and the deceased.

"I can't understand why anyone would even think of doing this," he said.

"Why can't they just let people rest in peace?"