Whatever happened to letting someone rest in peace?
A man with an apparent 48-year grudge has been going each morning to urinate on the grave of his ex, much to the horror of her furious kids, who realized something was wrong when they discovered bags of poop left at their mom’s final resting place.
“I felt like getting out and killing him,” said Michael Andrew Murphy, 43, told The Post of what it was like to catch the man he says has been desecrating the burial site of his mom, Linda Torello.
Torello, 66, died of cancer in 2017 and is buried just over the state line in the cemetery at Tappan Reformed Church in Orangetown, NY.
Murphy and his sister first noticed a plastic bag of poop at their mother’s grave in April and thought it was something left by mistake by a dog walker.
But then it happened again.
The siblings called the cops, who took a report. Determined to figure out what was going on, the pair got permission from a cemetery manager to place trail cameras in the trees to see if they could catch the vandal.
When they checked the camera footage, they spotted the gross grave visitor: a man who was briefly married to Torello in the 1970s.
The footage was too blurry and grainy to take to authorities, so a week ago, Murphy and his sister got up at 5 a.m. to drive to the cemetery and laid in wait. Murphy set up his smartphone on a nearby headstone to take better photos and hid behind a small shed.
Murphy said the video and pictures he and his sister got indicated that the man drove to the cemetery almost every morning between 6:14 a.m. and 6:18 a.m. with his current wife, got out of the car, walked to Torello’s grave and peed on it.
“I can’t get my wife to go out to dinner but this guy gets his wife to go along with him to desecrate my mom’s remains every morning!” Murphy fumed.
“I was shaking while I was hiding. My sister was crying. … I was sick I was so angry,” he said of the situation, which was first reported in the Daily Voice.
Murphy claims he’s gone to the cops at least three times and they refuse to let him speak to a detective.
A woman who answered the phone at the Orangetown Police station Saturday referred a call from The Post to the police captain who she said is not in on weekends.
“I don’t know if man owns a dog, or is sh-tting in a bag himself, or is getting some dog sh-t,” Murphy said. “All I know is that he’s using my mother’s grave as his toilet every morning.”
The man, whose name The Post is not revealing since he has not been charged, did not respond to a call from The Post.
The pissy man left Murphy’s mother when she was pregnant and never had anything to do with his biological daughter, the son claims, except for one time earlier this year when he ran into the daughter and said he wished she were dead and cursed her and her mother.
“He could have been peeing out there for five years and we wouldn’t have known it,” Murphy said. “We only found out because of the feces.”
