At about 8:10 in the evening of 16 May 1978, during Mass in the basilica at Aparecida, a nineteen-year-old from São José dos Campos named Rogério Marcos de Oliveira climbed up to the niche of the statue, broke the protective glass and seized the image. Caught by a sanctuary guard, he let it fall onto the pavement. The terracotta broke into more than two hundred fragments, many of them tiny; the head shattered, and part of the right side of the face was reduced to powder or lost.
The pieces were entrusted to Maria Helena Chartuni, head of the restoration department of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Working between 28 June and 31 July 1978 — thirty-three days — she reassembled the statue fragment by fragment, and where the right side of the face was missing sculpted it afresh from the surviving left side and from replicas supplied by the priests. On 19 August 1978 the restored image was carried back into the sanctuary on an open fire-brigade vehicle, and it remains enshrined on the main altar of the largest Marian basilica in the world.