(Tribune News Service) — Parts of some headstones were launched dozens of feet from their original location, while others were stained with motor oil when a driver veered off the road and plowed his car into St. Mary Cemetary in Northampton before dawn Saturday, officials said.

Some of the stone monuments damaged in what Northampton Police said was a drunk-driving crash marked the graves of war veterans, according to a cemetery employee and volunteer who labored Monday to clean up the wreckage.

Jim McCool Jr., a Florence resident and Navy veteran who volunteers to help maintain the cemetery several days a week, said news of the crash brought him to tears.

“It’s very difficult,” he said, choking up amid crumbled and knocked-over grave markers, tire tracks and patches of oil.

McCool and employees of the cemetery spent Monday cleaning up the rubble of Saturday’s crash. There were headstones smashed into several pieces that needed to be collected, weighty stone monuments knocked on their sides, grave markers splattered with fluids from a car, and plaques used to mark the graves of veterans that had been bent or snapped.

Nearly 20 gravestones were damaged, police and cemetery employees said.

“It’s a shame,” said Brian Kennedy, executive director of the Springfield Diocesan Cemeteries, as he surveyed the damage. “We’ve had collisions with monuments, but never like this.”

Roy Chapman, a Northampton resident and the cemetery supervisor, recalled a handful of other incidents in which a few headstones had been damaged.

“This is the worst we’ve had,” he said.

McCool said the area of the cemetery damaged in the crash was the resting place of a number of World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War veterans, and he rattled off the names of the deceased and where they had served.

His father, who was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and survived a German prisoner-of-war camp, is buried elsewhere in the cemetery, as are other family members.

With the clean-up underway, a 19-year-old driver appeared in Northampton District Court on Monday to face a charge of operating under the influence of alcohol in connection with the crash.

Matthew Fontaine-Dulude, of Holyoke, pleaded not guilty to a single count of OUI and related charges. He was released and ordered to return to court on June 13.

An attorney representing Fontaine-Dulude — who was also listed in court filings as Matthew Dulude — did not immediately respond to a phone call and text seeking comment.

According to a police report, an officer passing by the cemetery on Bridge Road around 1:40 a.m. Saturday came upon Fontaine-Dulude, his father, a friend and a damaged Infiniti G35X sedan amid the wreckage of the gravestones.

Fontaine-Dulude told officers he lost control of the car as he swerved out of the way to avoid an oncoming vehicle in his lane, the police report said.

After the crash, the teenager had called his father, who arrived at the cemetery and attempted to drag the vehicle away with his SUV, he told police, according to the report.

A breathalyzer test taken at the crash scene indicated Fontaine-Dulude’s blood alcohol content was above the legal limit to drive, police said.

Reached by phone Monday afternoon, Steven Connor, the director of Central Hampshire Veterans’ Services, said he was headed to the cemetery Tuesday morning to offer his help.

“We want to those [headstones] upright for Memorial Day,” he said.

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