Tragic Lee Smith's parents Lee and Andrea Barlow have called for CCTV to be installed at the cemetery after the tulips were taken.
The tot died after being born six-months prematurely in February 2013.
Lee’s dad, also called Lee, wants cameras to be placed in
Anfield cemetery, in Liverpool, following the theft from his grave.
Mr Smith, 42, bought the polished wooden tulips on a trip to Amsterdam shortly before Christmas, but they were stolen within weeks of being left on the grave, the Liverpool Echo reports.
He said: “Little bits have been going missing previously but about three months ago we got him handcrafted tulips from Amsterdam, and someone’s just pulled them out.
“They haven’t got any CCTV cameras in the cemetery.
“It breaks my heart. It’s traumatising because we’d like to do something special for our baby because he’s not with us.
“The tulips looked lovely. They’d been brought all the way from Amsterdam. Someone else has brought me some little ones and we don’t want to put them down now.”
Mr Smith said that he had reported the thefts to cemetery security, who said they were looking out for the thieves.
He and his girlfriend Andrea Barlow, 34, added that they’d been disappointed at the levels of security on site during recent visits.
A spokesman for Liverpool city council, who run the cemetery, said: “We would offer our sympathy to the family who have had items removed from their son’s grave. The people responsible for this have added to the grief of a bereaved family and their actions are thoroughly reprehensible.
“There are regular security patrols at Anfield cemetery and it is locked at night. We understand Mr Smith’s concern over CCTV but the cemetery’s size would make it difficult to cover comprehensively and a number of bereaved families have expressed the view that they would not wished to be filmed when they tended graves.”
heartless indeed
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