I could be wrong and I’m no shrink, but in my experience kids who do this are angry at the world and want to hurt as many people as they can. Defacing someone’s religious icon is a pretty good way to do just that – certainly got a rise outta you. Since it was a group, I’d guess that one of the kids was the ring leader and the others followed along because of peer pressure. I’d bet money that at least one of the kids has some relation with the church – perhaps a member or a student at a nearby Catholic school.
That doesn’t lessen the severity of the crime. Those kids need to be taught a lesson and that lesson should involve a great deal of pain. A couple hundred hours working alongside the road in orange pajamas outta do the trick.
What caught my attention was that you immediately assumed it was the work of religious extremists. Why would you do that? Surely you’ve read dozens of similar stories over the years. Ask yourself what sort of person has usually been responsible?
And if it’s a hate crime, by all means prosecute it as such.
Of late, ideological extremists. Like the Muslim who defaced a church of southern CA a couple of years back. Or the Jamaican Protestant who vandalized a series of churches in Brooklyn a couple of years ago. Or the Protestants who defaced a church in AL last year. Or the racist Satanists who destroyed my parish's statue of the Virgin a year and a half ago.
The ones at my parish were teenagers, but they were also members of a neo-Nazi group who targeted the church in part because they hated Christianity as a "Jew-based" relgion and because they also hated Mexicans who tend to be Catholic.
Again, returning to the scene in order to try and torch the remains of the statue you desecrated represents pretty serious animus.