Sledgehammer Attack Beheads Marine Statue at Iwo Jima Monument Near Quantico

A 27-year-old Virginia man beheaded one of the six Marine statues at the Iwo Jima monument near the Quantico Marine base, according to Prince William County police, who estimate the damage in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Officers arrived at the site Wednesday night and found Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano of Stafford "actively damaging the statue with a sledgehammer," the incident report states. The attack cost one of the monument's Marines his head. It left a second figure's helmet and face "chipped and gouged." The stone bayonet carved over the back of a third statue's rifle is missing.

What charges does the suspect face?

Maldonado Soriano was arrested at the scene. He faces two felony counts — injury to a monument and destruction of property — plus a misdemeanor charge of trespass with intent to damage property. A representative for the attorney assigned to his case declined to comment at the time of writing. He is being held without bond pending a court appearance.

Police have not disclosed a motive. Sledgehammers are blunt instruments, but they require sustained effort; this was not a passing impulse.

What is the monument, exactly?

The vandalized work is a smaller version of Arlington's Marine Corps War Memorial. Both depict the scene in Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph for the Associated Press: six US Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during World War II.

The image carries its own contested history. Rosenthal actually captured the second flag raising on the mountaintop, and for decades he was accused of staging the scene — an accusation he denied until his death.

Why the image endures

The US and Japanese militaries fought fiercely for control of the island, which held real strategic weight: taken, it would mark the first Japanese home territory captured by the Americans.

Of the six Marines in the photograph, only three survived the war. Three were killed within weeks of the photograph, before the battle for the mountaintop officially ended.

That is the arithmetic behind the memorial, and it explains why a damaged statue near Quantico reads as more than a property crime. The monument is a replica of a photograph, and the photograph memorializes men who mostly did not come home. The suspect's court appearance will determine the legal consequences; the repairs, by police estimate, will run to hundreds of thousands of dollars.