The owners of Sawnee View Gardens are preparing to install surveillance cameras throughout their cemetery in Cumming after thieves stole 60 bronze flower vases from grave sites over Father's Day weekend, possibly to sell for scrap metal.

"I know there are a lot of little old ladies who would like to get a hold of who did this," said Scott Bennett, manager of the 44-year-old cemetery, a pastoral setting that borders a pond and cow pasture off Dahlonega Highway. "Family members, men and women both, they are just disgusted that someone would do something like this."

The Forsyth Sheriff's Office has asked recycling companies to watch for the vases, which Bennett valued at $8,400. Though they don't keep related statistics, officials in the cemetery and scrap metal industries say they have noticed more reports of such thefts across the country as the price of copper —- a bronze ingredient —- has jumped.

Copper sells for about $3.75 a pound, up from about $3 in December, according to the Washington-based Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Meanwhile, the price for a ton of scrap iron and steel jumped from about $248 to $520 during the same time frame.

Thieves also have been stealing iron manhole covers from streets and raiding construction sites and foreclosed homes, stripping them of recyclable metals.

The demand for all these metals has surged along with the economies in four rapidly growing countries: China, Russia, Brazil and India, said Bruce Savage, spokesman for the scrap recycling institute.

"We are seeing more and more of those types of thefts, unfortunately, nationally," Savage said. "This is a problem that continues to grow."

Savage said the institute is working with police, alerting recyclers about thefts and urging them to keep detailed records of their purchases.

Newspapers have documented similar thefts in recent weeks in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and West Virginia.

Several cemeteries in Gwinnett and DeKalb counties have been hit in recent months, including ones in Snellville, Stone Mountain, Tucker and Decatur, according to the Georgia Cemetery Association.

"It's alarming. We go to a lot of meetings involving funerals and cemetery conventions, and there is a buzz out there all over the United States," said David Broel, the association's president.

In January 2007, thieves stole 82 bronze memorials and vases from Dawn Memorial Park cemetery off Glenwood Road in Decatur, said Vanessa Williamson, the cemetery's general manager.

"They actually unscrewed them and took them from the granite base, not just the vases, but the entire memorial," Williamson said. "There had to be several people involved. It takes a couple of people to install just one memorial."

At Sawnee View Gardens, the thieves snapped the thin chains that secure the vases to the memorials. Freddie Anderson said she noticed the vase missing from her husband's grave site at Sawnee View Gardens when she went for a visit on Father's Day. Her husband, Glenn Anderson, died that day in 2003 at age 75.

"I was really upset about it because he has been there five years and I have been going over there putting flowers in it every year on Father's Day," said Anderson, who plans to be buried next to her husband. "When they go in and steal from the dead, I don't know what to think about people like that."