Beth Jacobi was running early for lunch with a friend, so she decided to visit her parents' graves at the Mount Rose Cemetery, where she always keeps plastic flowers in the copper alloy vases around the tombstones. When she arrived, she was shocked.

"I couldn't see the flowers. I parked, got out of the car, walked over. And that's when I saw that the vases were gone. Someone had taken the flowers out, removed the vase from the bronze vase, and stuck the flowers into the hole," Jacobi said.

Upon further inspection, Jacobi noticed at least a dozen other holes on neighboring graves where vases had been.

The Mount Rose robberies vase are not an isolated incident, as a similar theft occurred a few months ago in the Susquehanna Memorial Gardens.

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Spring Garden Township and York Regional Police Departments have been working on trying to figure out who is taking the vases.

"We are investigating these thefts in collaboration with the York County Regional Police Department and are currently pursuing leads," Spring Garden Police Chief George Swartz wrote in an email. "The first incident report to us this year was on 3/3/2022. We do not see many of these types of thefts, however, there have been similar incidents reported in past years."

Swartz said there may be similar theft reports in the coming months as the weather improves and more families visit the gravesite.

The York County Regional Police Department could not be reached for comment.

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Mount Rose general manager Amy Cincibus said the cemetery has been reaching out to families of those in the graveyard and trying to keep them in the loop.

"You know, in my experience, this can happen anywhere when items are outside of any cemetery," Cincibus said.

According to Cincibus, it is illegal for scrapyards to buy vases like the ones missing from Mount Rose, but they are still coming up with ways of deterring thieves from returning to the cemetery. The vases are worth up to $200.

There have been pushes in the cemetery and memorial industry to create high-quality polymer plastic vases that look like bronze. They do not have any scrap value and are less costly to replace.

"Honestly, we're here for the families. And that's our number one goal," Cincibus said. "We want to help out as much as possible."

But until the vases are found, Jacobi plans on buying plastic next time.

"I was just disgusted, I guess, that people do that," Jacobi said. "It should be a place of respect and dignity. And instead it's, you know, a place where people rob people?"

Jack Panyard is a reporter at the York Daily Record, part of the USA TODAY Network. Contact him at jpanyard@ydr.com, 717-850-5935 or on Twitter @JackPanyard.