In the middle of the night on January 3, the high school was severely vandalized. Students and faculty arrived at school the next morning to see a bus, which had been parked in a side parking lot, with a smashed windshield and covered in graffiti. The outside walls of the school itself, and a few windows, had also been covered with graffiti, as well as some sidewalks around the campus.
“Normally this kind of thing is done as a prank, or somebody has something against the school and this is their way of getting back at it,” assistant principal Chris Mayfield said.
So far the investigation has turned up no leads.
“I don’t know why whoever did the graffiti decided to choose Lovejoy,” Mayfield said. “Whether it was a student here or somebody from another school who just decided to put graffiti on our school, not a lot of us thought that we would be the target of graffiti.”
Discipline for the perpetrator depends on how much the graffiti ends up costing the school. With more than $6,000 in damages, those responsible will likely face felony criminal mischief charges, School Resource Officer Mark Mitchell said.
However, the investigation will not be handled by Officer Mitchell.
“I have taken a report and I turn that in to the investigators,” Mitchell said. “They will investigate it and when they find out who it is, they will then turn that over to the DA’s office. Then the DA’s office will take the person to court and it will either be up to a judge or a jury to listen to all the evidence and determine whether they are guilty or innocent.”
The first reaction of the administration to the graffiti was disappointment.
“For a lot of us it was difficult to think that somebody would want to do that to our school,” Mayfield said. “The initial reaction was just one of shock.”
Students were also saddened by the desecration of school property.
“I know people were upset to come back to school, but that [the vandalism] was kind of ridiculous,” junior Lauren Sanders said.
In light of the magnitude of the crime, a $250 reward is being offered to anyone who has information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the graffiti.
“It’s a serious thing to put graffiti on a school, not just Lovejoy but any school, and it’s actually illegal,” Mayfield said. “We want it to stop and we decided to offer the reward in order to get as much information as possible about the situation.”
Any information pertaining to the persons responsible for the vandalism can be reported to Officer Mitchell or Mr. Mayfield.
