In a graveyard in the eastern USA, there stands a full-size Mercedes-Benz granite tombstone, which represents one brother’s promise to another.
As you might be able to gather – the story is about a cemetery, after all – this is quite a sad tale, but it’s also a tale of brotherly love and respecting the wishes of those who sadly leave this world prematurely.
The Mercedes-Benz granite tombstone stands in Rosedale Cemetery just outside of Newark, New Jersey.
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It commemorates the life of Raymond Tse, a youngster who died at the age of 15, before he was even able to obtain his driving license.
However, his brother David, a wealthy businessman, had always promised to buy his beloved younger sibling a Mercedes-Benz when he was old enough to drive, and this monument on his final resting place is a fulfilment of that solemn vow.
He had the Mercedes-Benz granite tombstone hewn from one single piece of rock, and it is a full-scale replica of a Mercedes 240 Diesel car, right down to every small little detail, including the screws on the license plate, which reads ‘RAY TSE’.
It weights 36 tonnes with the slab it stands on and took 17 months to build, taking the skills of a full team of three stonemasons 17 months to complete.
The monument has stood there since the early 1980s, after Raymond died in 1981.
One of the attendees at his funeral and a tenant in one of the apartment blocks owned by David Tse was Richard, who explained some of the details about this strange monument to Weird NJ back in 2019.
He said: “David owned several luxury cars himself, and promised to buy Ray one for his seventeenth birthday.
“Ray lived in Hong Kong, but he visited David in America often.
“David was about twenty years older than Ray.
“When Ray died (of a disease, not a car accident), his parents could not accept the loss and shipped the body over here for burial.
“They didn’t even attend the funeral,” he continued.
“At the service we were all given play money and fake gold bars to throw into a can of fire so that Ray would have wealth in the afterlife.
“They also gave out real money, which would have been disrespectful to refuse.
“I was given $30 which I threw in a drawer and did not touch for five years.”
He continued: “Ray’s mausoleum and Mercedes take up forty cemetery plots and cost $500,000 back in the 1981.
“David is said to still visit the grave ever day.”
The monument is a thing of beauty, and it’s a real testament to the craft of the stonemasons that built it.
They must have used a real Mercedes as a guide for how to design this one, and it has textured lights and tires, windshield wipers, and an exhaust pipe with muffler all carved from the one stone block.
The only things that aren’t present are the wing mirrors and the iconic Mercedes-Benz badge, for fear that they might have been stolen or fallen off.
In the end, David kept his promise to his brother, although not in the way that he would have hoped.
This Mercedes-Benz granite tombstone stands as a monument not only to Ray Tse, but to the brother who loved and missed him after he was gone.
David reportedly passed away himself in 2020, but the marker he left for his little brother’s grave remains to this day.
