In June 2000, vandals broke into Ronnie Van Zant’s grave and pulled out his unopened coffin. They did the same to Steve Gaines’ grave and pulled out his cremains from its urn, spilling some in the process. The police never caught the vandals. In the wake of this, the Gaines family reburied Steve in a secret location. The Van Zant family did the same with Ronnie but a Craigslist ad in 2012 listing cemetery plots for sale accidentally revealed where the Van Zants had taken Ronnie’s remains. They had reburied him in Riverside Memorial Park, also in the Jacksonville area.
Today, the area of the crash site where Van Zant, the Gaines siblings, and three others died, is marked by a memorial of black granite dedicated to Lynyrd Skynyrd. A few months before the plane crash, Van Zant had told the band’s drummer Artemis Pyle he wouldn’t see 30 and would die with his boots on. “He was right about both,” Pyle recalled. “He went out with his boots on, with style and grace, and honor, and he was just 29 years old.”
[Featured image by Pairko via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY -SA 4.0]
