Downtown Confederate soldiers have rough weekend; MPD investigating

A Milledgeville Police Department officer realized that something definitely was different about the two soldiers on the Confederate monument while patrolling downtown on Sunday afternoon. 

Both soldiers, the north-facing one and the south-facing one, were vandalized with a can of black spray paint at some point late Saturday or early Sunday morning. South-facing soldier was more meticulously and throughly painted black, and the vandal/s basically got all of its exposed statue skin – the hands, the neck and the face.

However, based on the fact that north-facing soldier was left half-done, whoever did it definitely ran out of spray paint at some point.

This is north-facing soldier.

Investigators with the Milledgeville Police Department are now requesting security video from Georgia Military College, the public library and anywhere else with functioning cameras in the area. Something similar occurred earlier this year in the north Georgia town of Chatsworth, and the offender ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of "defacing a public monument," which is s misdemeanor. According to the statute, it  "shall be unlawful for any person, firm, corporation, or other entity acting without authority to mutilate, deface, defile, abuse contemptuously, relocate, remove, conceal, or obscure any privately owned monument, plaque, marker, or memorial which is dedicated to, honors, or recounts the military service of any past or present military personnel of this state, the United States of America or the several states thereof, or the Confederate States of America or the several states thereof."

The 21st century is only 22 years old, but it's already been a really long one for   Milledgeville's south-facing soliders. The previous south-facing soldier, which had stood for 104 years, was mowed down and knocked over by a lady who was having a medical emergency in 2016. North-facing soldier then stood by himself for three years until 2019, when the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was able to raise $30,000 and work with a granite-company out of Elberton on a replacement south-facing soldier.

Anyone with any information on the crime is asked to call the Milledgeville Police Department at 478-414-4413.

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