On Thursday the executive producers of the movie series God’s Not Dead donated $25,000 to resurrect the 6-foot-tall statues, which toppled over and shattered when 32-year-old Michael Tate Reed II of Van Buren rammed them with his car on June 27, posting a video of the act on Facebook.
Reed was arrested at the scene and faces a felony charge of first degree criminal mischief and a misdemeanor charge of defacing an object of public respect.
In 2014, Reed, a Bible college dropout who has suffered from mental health issues, also destroyed a Ten Commandments statue in Oklahoma.
He is currently being held on a $100,000 bond for destroying the Arkansas statue.
The original statue was paid for using $26,000 in private funds raised by an organization established by Republican Senator Jason Rapert called the American History & Heritage Foundation, and at a June 28 news conference Rapert told reporters that he had no intention of rebuilding the religious statue using taxpayers dollars.
Altogether, about $55,000 in private donations has been raised to rebuild the statue, including the donation from the filmmakers. Rapert said that people have been sending in money through the mail, a fundraising website and even in person.
Ramming the monument was an incident "nobody could have foreseen,” according to Rapert, promising that the new statue would have some kind of "aesthetically pleasing" security.
He said that the new monument would be the same as the first, "right down to the granite that was used," according to Arkansas online, and that the new commandments should be ready to install in about two months.
