From the archives: This story was last updated in May 2019.
Two young brothers who vandalized a memorial in Barberton, Ohio, have been punished in a way they won’t forget by their mother, who says they now understand the severity of their act.“My two little boys decided to sneak out of the house last Sunday morning with their friend and ripped flowers out of the Military Memorial at Lake Anna in Barberton,” the boys’ mother, Alicia Sharp, told Cleveland 19 in August 2018.
And she wasn’t going to let them off the hook. She decided to serve them a lesson that was guaranteed to sink in.
“I made them stand with signs down by the lake for two hours on Friday saying what they did and apologizing,” Sharp said.
But that wasn’t all, though.
The boys, who both receive a monthly $50 allowance, were stripped of their allotment for that month. The $100 combined total was then put toward feeding veterans at the Shannon Bar, where Sharp works as a bartender.
“Most of the folks who come in here are veterans,” she said.
“It wasn’t right for what they did,” says veteran Dan Ady, a patron at the Shannon Bar. “But kids are kids.”
No doubt Sharp would’ve sat her boys down and explained to them the significance of the memorial and why all those names were on the wall.
“She’s trying to make up for it,” Ady adds. “She’s done a good job and she feels sorry about this too.”
Sharp says her kids were not aware of the memorial’s significance before, but they are now reading about their unique punishment in a front page editorial in the Barberton Herald newspaper.
