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Man Charged in Destruction of Boston Holocaust Memorial

Bill Satterlund, facilities manager for Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston, begins to pick up broken glass from one of the Holocaust Memorial's glass panels shattered with a rock thrown shortly before 2 a.m., June 28, 2017. The memorial is designed around six luminous glass towers, which symbolize the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the names of the six main death camps, and the six years during which Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" took place from 1939 to 1945.

Bill Satterlund, facilities manager for Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston, begins to pick up broken glass from one of the Holocaust Memorial's glass panels shattered with a rock thrown shortly before 2 a.m., June 28, 2017. The memorial is designed around six luminous glass towers, which symbolize the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the names of the six main death camps, and the six years during which Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" took place from 1939 to 1945.

The lawyer for a man charged with throwing a rock through a glass panel at the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston says her client suffers from mental health issues.

James Isaac, 21, was held Wednesday on charges of willful and malicious destruction of personal property and willful and malicious destruction of a place of a monument.

Police said Isaac smashed the 8.8-foot (2.7-meter) panel about 2 a.m. He was quickly arrested after a witness called police.

His court-appointed attorney, Rebecca Kozak, said her client was "struggling considerably'' and was participating in a partial hospitalization program at a mental health facility.

The destroyed panel was etched with numbers that represented tattoos on the arms of Jews sent to Nazi death camps.

Extra panels were made and stored when the memorial opened, and the organization that oversees the memorial did not expect repairs to take long.