QUANTICO, Va. — The man accused of smashing the Iwo Jima monument outside Marine Corps Base Quantico with a sledgehammer got bond on Monday, set by a circuit court judge.
Court documents cited by CNN put the bond for Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano at $2,500, secured. Maldonado Soriano is 27 and lives in Stafford. Release would come with strings: GPS monitoring, alcohol and drug testing, and no leaving Virginia. A mental health evaluation is part of it too, and he would have to follow whatever treatment it recommends.
Maldonado Soriano faces felony destruction of property, trespass with intent to damage and felony injury to a monument, court records show. His preliminary hearing has been set for January, the Washington Examiner reported.
Police arrested him on Wednesday evening, Oct. 21. Officers who answered a report of destruction of property at the base saw a man “actively damaging the statue with a sledgehammer” and detained him without incident, Prince William County police said.
One figure on the monument had been beheaded. Police put the damage at hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there is no timeline yet for repairs.
A court document released on Monday added a detail from that night. Police, it says, saw a man on top of the monument “attempting to remove the American flag.”
Why he did it is still not clear. Maldonado Soriano told police “he had been told to do so,” the court document says.
“As far as a motive, the accused has given us multiple, conflicting reasons,”
NBC4, in reporting cited by the Washington Examiner, said a detective told the court on Monday that Maldonado Soriano showed signs of mental health issues. ICE has a detainer on him too, the outlet reported — he holds no green card, though Stafford County has been home since he was 1 year old.
The Department of Homeland Security says Maldonado Soriano is a Mexican national, in the United States since 1999. DACA status came during the Obama administration, the department told CNN.
CNN asked the attorney listed for him in court records for comment. Whether he entered a plea was not immediately clear.
The statue he is accused of damaging is not the big one in Arlington. The Quantico piece is smaller — limestone, not bronze, roughly 36 miles south of Washington, and a replica of Felix de Weldon’s Marine Corps War Memorial.
It recreates Joe Rosenthal’s Feb. 23, 1945 photograph: six Marines, a flag going up on Iwo Jima, in the middle of World War II. De Weldon saw that photo while he was serving in the Navy. He began carving in 1945, Marine Corps Base Quantico says, and had the smaller version done before the year ended. The 60-foot bronze original in Arlington was not completed until 1954.
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