A southern Utah woman recently convicted of damaging a petroglyph panel near the Utah-Arizona border last year won’t face jail time but will be on probation for the next year, a federal court ordered on Monday.
Daniela Ganassim Ericksen, 47, of Ivins, Washington County, was sentenced to 12 months of probation and ordered to pay close to $15,000 in fines and restitution, a federal court determined. Ericksen was also ordered to write an apology letter to all “relevant stakeholder tribes” in the area and will not be allowed on Bureau of Land Management land over the next year, U.S. Department of Justice officials added on Monday.
Her sentence was handed down nearly a year to the day that the Bureau of Land Management and Kane County Sheriff’s Office began investigating the defacement of petroglyphs near the confluence of Wire Pass and Buckskin Gulch, a remote area about 25 miles southwest of Big Water. Repairs to the damaged panel ultimately cost close to $12,000, according to the Department of Justice.
Ericksen was arrested less than two weeks later, after bureau officials released a photo of the incident and offered a $1,000 reward in the case.
She pleaded guilty in the case in June, St. George News reported. The outlet noted that she could have faced up to a year of jail and 60 months of probation but faced a large fine and probation as part of her plea agreement.
Buckskin Gulch features about 16 miles of “unique formations and undulating sandstone walls” within Paria Canyon-Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness, according to the Bureau of Land Management. Historians believe the imagery left behind by prehistoric people dates back approximately 3,000 to 5,000 years.
The case sparked widespread attention after it happened, especially from Native American tribes and state preservation officials, who said it’s part of an ongoing trend of defacement to public lands and prehistoric artifacts.
The incident was “disrespectful to the tribal people of Utah,” said Autumn Gillard, the cultural resource manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, a little more than a week after Ericksen’s arrest.
“For us, as tribal people, these are our churches,” she said at the time. “When folks go in and they vandalize panels, or they vandalize cultural sites, we correlate it to the same thing as if somebody was to go into a temple or a religious space and were to write graffiti all over it or to write their name all over it.”