Illegal Alien Charged With Beheading a Marine on Quantico's Iwo Jima Statue With a Sledgehammer

For decades, a pale limestone statue of six Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima has stood at the front gate of Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Late Wednesday night, police say a 27-year-old man walked up to it with a sledgehammer and knocked the head off one of those Marines.

Prince William County police say officers got the call at about 10:13 p.m. on Oct. 21 and found Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano of Stafford "actively damaging the statue with a sledgehammer," according to the department's release. He was detained on the spot without a struggle. Besides the missing head, the department estimates the damage "in hundreds of thousands of dollars."

He is charged with felony destruction of property, trespass with intent to damage property and felony injury to a monument, and he is being held without bond. No court date has been set, and police have not given a motive (NBC4 Washington).

Who police say did it

The local reports stopped at "Stafford man." Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin filled in the rest Thursday evening. "Multiple federal sources confirm to @FoxNews that the suspect arrested for using a sledgehammer to behead a WW2 Iwo Jima monument in Quantico, VA ... is a Mexican illegal alien & former DACA recipient whose legal status expired this year," he posted.

According to those sources, Maldonado Soriano crossed into the country illegally in December 1999. The Obama administration granted him DACA, the program that shields people brought here as children, in 2014. It was renewed for years, most recently by the Biden administration in 2024. It lapsed in August when the Trump administration didn't renew it (Fox News).

So for most of the last 12 years, he stayed on a federal permission slip first handed out under Obama and last renewed under Biden. The White House didn't mince words. "This criminal illegal alien's dream is over," spokeswoman Taylor Rogers told Fox News. "Maldonado Soriano disrespected our brave service members and defaced a beautiful monument that honored their sacrifice."

The Washington Post's headline called him a "Virginia man." Local outlets went with "Stafford man" or just "man." The detail that has hundreds of thousands of people talking was left for Fox to report.

What was smashed

Police told Fox News Digital that the Marine on the far right end of the statue is left with no head. A second Marine has gouges across his helmet and face, and a third lost part of the bayonet on the rifle slung over his back (Fox News).

The sculptor was Felix de Weldon, the same artist who made the giant bronze Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington. He carved the 9-foot Quantico version from limestone after seeing Joe Rosenthal's famous photo of the flag going up on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945 (NBC4 Washington). The Marine Corps calls it a "non-heroic-size" replica of the Arlington memorial (WTOP).

The fighting on Iwo Jima cost nearly 7,000 American lives. Three of the six men who raised that flag were killed on the island in the days after. The statue at Quantico is the base's way of saying it remembers.

"There have been generations of promotions and commissionings and retirements and re-enlistments done in front of this iconic monument," Keil Gentry, director of the nearby National Museum of the Marine Corps, told NBC4. Experts are already looking at repairs, which he said are "likely to be challenging."

Think of it like a family headstone. You can patch the stone, but you can't undo the fact that someone came at night with a hammer to break it.

Not the first repair

The Quantico statue has needed help before. It was vandalized in 2012, hurt by a storm in 2014, and in 2018 a windstorm cracked the hands holding the flagpole so badly the flag had to come down (Potomac Local). Back then, Marines on base offered to fix it themselves. "Send a Gunny and three Marines out there. There'll be a flag up in fifteen minutes," one Marine told the base's public affairs office, according to a base spokesman at the time.

This time the damage is far worse, and it wasn't the weather.

What's next

Maldonado Soriano stays in jail without bond while the state case moves toward a court date. With his DACA gone, Fox's federal sources say he has no legal status in the country at all, so the local charges may not be the last thing he faces. For the statue, the museum says repair experts have already been called in. Until they finish, the Marines at Quantico's front gate will be missing one of their own.