The same evening, security cameras captured another young man, who picked the statue from the ground, placed it on its base, and sat before the statue in prayer.
Fr. Timothy Do, the parish pastor, asked parishioners to "pray for peace in the world, the end of hatred and anger, and that we continue to have compassion and love for each other," in a video released on Facebook July 22.
In additional videos, parishioners prayed both the chaplet of divine mercy and the rosary in Spanish while standing before the damaged statue.
Upland is a suburb east of Los Angeles in California's Inland Empire. The toppling of its statue came amid weeks of church vandalism and destruction in the U.S., in which statues of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary have been defaced, graffitied, and beheaded. A Florida man admitted this month to setting a Florida church on fire, and in California, a fire at a mission church founded in the eighteenth century by St. Junipero Serra is being investigated for arson. Also in California, several statues of Serra have been torn down and defaced, and some have been moved from public locations.
The vandal in Upland has not yet been identified.