Eight months after vandals burglarized a Catholic school in the Wrigley area, wreaking havoc that cost half a million dollars in repairs and upgrades, school staff held a gala this week to unveil renovations that restored the campus and thank the donors who funded them.
In February, the staff of Holy Innocents Catholic School found their campus unrecognizable. Intruders had pried open the school’s doors and left a tornado of destruction in the assembly hall, chapel and classrooms.
They smashed sacred objects and urinated on prayer books. Statues of the Virgin Mary, which had been part of the school since the 1950s and were valued at 10s of thousands of dollars, were broken, some parts pulverized. (Police did not immediately respond to questions about whether they have arrested any suspects.)
The Holy Innocents Community sprang into action, raising $400,000 in total, which paid for a new stage, electrical and air conditioning repairs, replacements for sacred objects and major security enhancements, said Tony Tripp, the school’s director of advancement.
News of the vandalism soon reached Guy Hazelzet, a former Holy Innocents student who now lives in Alabama. He began attending the school in 1963 — “a big part of my upbringing,” he said — and remembered being greeted by one of the statues each day on his way in, he said.
Hazelzet’s parents, Dutch immigrants, were active parishioners at Holy Innocents who dedicated themselves to serving the Long Beach community — offering free meals and raising funds for families in need — and instilled the same values in Hazelzet, he said.
He decided he wanted to underwrite the statue’s restoration, a way to honor his parents, who have since passed, and give back to the faith community that shaped him, he said.
Rebuilding the statue proved a laborious process, said Ash Avila of A Mano Art & Design, a specialized art company in Dana Point. Above the waist, the statue had been crushed to bits, forcing Avila to sculpt the figure from scratch.
A pipe provided a spine of stability, then Avila added styrofoam, plaster gauze, and began a meticulous process of layering plaster and sanding it back down. She matched the colors of the original paint and even placed a holy water ampule inside, she said.
Hazelzet and his wife drove for three days from Alabama to Long Beach to attend the celebration gala on Sunday. Alongside 300 other attendees, he watched a compilation of the news coverage of the burglaries, which resurfaced the horrific memories of the school’s desecration, he said.
Then, Hazelzet and Tripp unveiled the restored statue, replete with embellishments that Avila had added: a lace collar and a decorated sash belt, she said.
It was moving “to see that statue being brought back to life again,” Hazelzet said, adding that the tragedy of the break-ins had galvanized and unified the community. Without the support of the community, “this would have been a complete killer for us,” Tripp said. “There’s no way we could have recovered from this.”
The school is still waiting for a few more repairs. A new tabernacle is being handmade in Spain. Avila is finishing new stations of the cross, 14 images that depict Christ on the day of his crucifixion. Soon, carpenters will add warm wood molding to the chapel to create a different feeling, “so nobody looks in there and remembers what happened,” Tripp said.
With many of the repairs completed, Tripp said he is now turning his attention toward a different project, long in the works: the construction of a new building, which will house students in TK through eighth grade and increase the school’s capacity from about 300 to 500.
“Waiting lists abound,” Tripp said. He hopes the new buildings, expected to open in 2029, will allow the school community to grow.