Vandals

A DAY AFTER a 21-year-old man was arrested for slashing tires in Northeast Philadelphia, vandals early Wednesday damaged more than a dozen cars with a caustic chemical in Crescentville. The latest spree was reported about 4:30 a.m. on Van Kirk Street near Bingham. Initial reports indicated that an acid-like caustic liquid was thrown on more than a dozen cars, damaging their paint. Vehicles in various Northeast neighborhoods have been vandalized since October, causing thousands of dollars in damage.

Vandals took to the streets last week and went on a spree of smashing windows and bashing mailboxes. In what police said they believed were three unrelated incidents, 14 mailboxes were struck in Towamencin and neighboring Lower Salford Township. Towamencin police said vandals took 15 minutes on Saturday to damage windows in one car and four residences along Sumneytown Pike. Police said witnesses, who were also victims, saw two juveniles walking through their backyards between 5:15 and 5:30 a.m. but never notified police until after they realized the damage was done to their property.

Vandals deflated the tires of 19 school buses and one van in a Great Valley School District lot in Charlestown Township during the weekend, causing the district's five schools to open two hours late yesterday morning, district officials said. The vandals removed the tires' valve stems, said Nancy Ziegler, the district transportation supervisor. The vandalism was discovered about 5 a.m. yesterday when the first employees arrived at the lot, on Charlestown Road adjacent to Charlestown Elementary School, Ziegler said.

John Schroth was 83 years into eternity when vandals tipped over the looming, 10-foot-high granite tower marking his grave in Roslyn's Hillside Cemetery. That memorial, and an almost identical one right next to it, fell and split into several huge chunks. Schroth was not the only victim. Sophie Wahl, who died in 1926; Ernst Wahl, who died in 1929, and an entire generation of Duebles, who were born in the mid-1800s, all had the monuments memorializing their stays on earth knocked over like giant, granite dominoes, some falling under the weight of others.

Since last December, David Lee's fur store on Castor Avenue in the Northeast has been the target of vandals who claim to be dedicated to saving the lives of animals. "This is the sixth time I've been hit," Lee said yesterday inside his paint-splattered shop on Castor Avenue near Magee. After several threatening phone calls, a lock glued shut and a sign Lee found Sunday stuck to a window that said, "Death Merchant," he is convinced the vandals also are dedicated to putting him out of business.

Chronic teen-age vandalism is plaguing the Northeast Philadelphia headquarters of the Sunshine Foundation, a nationally known group that fulfills the last wishes of terminally ill children. Dried splatterings of eggs and tomatoes, graffiti scrawls and splotches of paint mar the brick walls of the organization's building. Tin sheeting on the facade has been pried out. Sunshine volunteers regularly clean up beer bottles and cans from the front and back steps. "I am so utterly amazed, I can't get over it," said Carolyn Kelly, secretary to the Sunshine Foundation's founder, former Philadelphia police Officer Bill Sample.

Eighteen-inch-high orange letters were spray-painted late Monday night outside the Bucks County courthouse complex in Doylestown Borough - at the main entrance to the courthouse, and on the Vietnam War and World War I memorials. On the Vietnam War memorial, the letters read, "FBI = Death," at the courthouse entrance, "Death to the ATF," and at the World War I memorial, "They Died in Vain. " The Bucks County commissioners said yesterday that they believed that the vandals were protesting the federal government's handling of the Branch Davidian cult standoff near Waco, Texas, especially the actions of the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Police in Delanco and Delran sorted yesterday through the shambles left in the wake of a crime spree that began Sunday evening in which the culprits vandalized a business and two schools and stole two cars and a pickup truck. No arrests have been made in the incident, which began about 7 p.m. Sunday in Delanco and ended in neighboring Delran sometime before 6:45 a.m. yesterday, police said. Delanco Township Police Lt. Edmund Parsons said the incident began with a burglary at the Rhawn Flange and Machine Co. on Pennsylvania Avenue between 7 and 9 p.m. Sunday.

Montgomery Cemetery in West Norriton, where five Union generals and hundreds of Civil War infantrymen are laid to rest, has been desecrated by vandals, police said. Sometime before 2 p.m. Tuesday, tombstones at the cemetery on Hartranft Avenue were overturned. One fell onto a burial vault, breaking the marble slab covering it and exposing coffins to the elements, Lt. Dale Mabry of the West Norriton Police said. A Christmas wreath and veteran's marker were thrown into the open vault, said Charles J. Kelly, a member of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, which owns the cemetery and tends it. "Some creep comes along and decides to take out what somebody wanted to be their final resting place, and violates it," Kelly, 52, said.

Vandals caused more than $3,000 damage to the property of Cherry Hill Councilman Michael A. Schaffer last week, and Schaffer, who is also a fire chief, said yesterday that the destruction might have been in retaliation for repeated calls to police about drinking on fire company property. Schaffer, a freshman member of the council, said that between 10:30 p.m. last Wednesday and 7:05 a.m. Thursday, someone entered the grounds of his house in the 100 block of Philmar Avenue and tore up a half-dozen six-foot evergreen trees that had been planted recently.

The Rev. Myrtle Daniels stepped up to the altar and switched on a reading light. Lucile Stewart-Mitchell took her seat at the piano, pressing open a hymn book. Karyn Fisher turned down music playing on an iPad. "We've had a busy week," Daniels announced, facing a dozen congregants gathered Sunday morning at Mount Zion A.M.E. in Woolwich Township. A week earlier, someone had rearranged the letters on the sign outside the tiny church, defacing it with a racist - and misspelled - message: No Nigers Welcome.

Glassboro police looking for two vandals responsible for a weekend tire slashing spree in the college town are studying surveillance video showing two men in one parking lot were several vehicles were targeted. During a three-day spree Easter weekend, the Glassboro Police Department took about 16 reports of tires slashed at different locations, many of them belonging to Rowan University students. "The reports stem from off campus," said Rowan spokesman Joe Cardona. Initially, all of the victims were affiliated with Rowan either as a student or as a guest, police said.

The Quaker meeting in Chestnut Hill acknowledged Tuesday that its decision to hire a nonunion contractor to build a new meetinghouse raised questions among Friends groups and caused division within its own ranks. Vandals attacked the Mermaid Lane construction site four days before Christmas, causing $500,000 of damage in what police said was a dispute between union members and the contractor. The vandalism, coupled with summer arrests at the Goldtex construction site on the edge of Center City, has focused attention on Philadelphia's history of labor-related violence.

It took four days to repair most of the $500,000 in damage done by vandals at the Quaker meetinghouse being built in Chestnut Hill. Still on site is the dead hulk of a crane, its cab burned in what authorities said was arson. "Do I think it was the unions?" said Robert Reeves, president of the nonunion Abington builder working at the site. "I don't think it was a group of 10-year-old boys. " Labor-related violence has declined in Philadelphia during the last 40 years, according to John Breese, an assistant regional director with the National Labor Relations Board.

Philadelphia police were pursuing a possible break Friday night in the hunt for the vandals who slashed the tires of nearly 60 vehicles early Monday on two blocks in West Philadelphia. The vandals are believed to be a man and a woman. Friday night, a woman seen in surveillance video taken when the tires were slashed turned herself in at the Southwest Detective Division, accompanied by her lawyer, police said. The City of Philadelphia and the Fraternal Order of Police have offered a reward totaling $10,000 for information leading to an arrest.

A nonunion building-trades group plans to offer a reward that could reach $50,000 for information leading to the conviction of the people who vandalized a Quaker meeting's construction site before Christmas. Police said $500,000 in damage to the East Mermaid Lane site, where the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting is building a meetinghouse, was the result of a dispute between members of a construction union and the project's nonunion contractor. No arrests have been made. Final details of the reward are being arranged, said Mary Tebeau, chief executive of the Eastern Pennsylvania Chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors Inc., which supports nonunion builders.

It was probably back in 1997, though some think it might have been even earlier, when the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting concluded that it had outgrown its space and that it was high time to erect a new building. But because it is not the Quaker way to rush into things, the group spent a few more years reflecting on whether it should buy land on Mermaid Lane for the new meetinghouse. Even after the group sealed the deal in 2003, there was still plenty more talking and thinking and praying to be done about the undertaking.

PITTSBURGH - Whoever used spray paint to mar the political banners in the window of the anti-Obama office in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood early Saturday maybe thought it was a clever idea, but he shouldn't be too surprised if police come knocking at his door. That's because the incident, in which anti-Obama messages were transformed into pro-Obama comments with the help of some red spray paint, was caught on video. A grainy surveillance video from the center's storefront at Murray and Forward Avenues shows a man walking up at 3:47 a.m. Saturday, spray painting the windows, and then calmly walking away.

In a possible case of competitive sabotage, skilled vandals destroyed from $2 million to $3 million worth of construction equipment at a Northeast Philadelphia work site, officials said Thursday. "It was like a scene from a movie, like Armageddon ," said Capt. Jack McGinnis, commanding officer of Northeast Detectives. Workers for Walsh Construction Co. II L.L.C. left the site, near Magee Avenue and New State Road in Tacony, about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday. When the workers returned at 7 a.m. Thursday, "they found the entire place completely demolished," McGinnis said.