Vandals tag numerous Glenwood buildings
rsummerlin@postindependent.com
What started as an isolated case of vandalism over the weekend spread into a graffiti spree Monday night across downtown Glenwood Springs.
First the Glenwood Springs Freemasons discovered Monday morning that their lodge had been spray painted with satanic graffiti. Investigators suspected the perpetrators of multiple taggings in downtown. By Tuesday morning several more locations were hit, including Glenwood Springs High School and the Glenwood Springs Post Office.
One door of the 86-year-old Masonic lodge building had been spray painted with a large red star, which Wayne Horak, a Mason and the building’s property manager, believed was supposed to be a pentagram. A second-story exterior door had also been spray painted with a blue pentagram, along with the words “Hail Satan.”
“Obviously we do not appreciate this,” said Horak. “We are Glenwood Springs’ oldest nonprofit organization. We give two scholarships per year, and we are [a partner organization] of the Shriners Hospitals for Children.
“We are not a Satan-worshiping organization,” said Horak.
Spray-paint graffiti around Glenwood Springs is fairly common, but satanic graffiti is rare, said Police Chief Terry Wilson. The police don’t have any suspects in the vandalism yet, but Wilson said he saw a garage tagged only a block or so away from the Masonic lodge over the weekend.
Graffiti at the high school included insults against a school official, said Wilson, though the chief declined to identify who that official was. Parents reported seeing spray painted obscenities while they dropped their kids off in the morning.
“No fat chicks,” one graffiti message read, according to the chief.
“This sounds like some pretty high-level intellectual stuff,” Wilson joked.
Similar graffiti was found across the downtown area, including the Cooper Avenue parking garage, Smalls Guns & Gold and the Christian Science Church.
And given the time frame and proximity of these locations, this is definitely a couple people playing around, he said.
“So it sounds like someone’s playing with paint in the downtown area” and when they’re caught “we’ll have all kinds of fun jobs for them to do around town,” said the chief.
If caught committing this kind of vandalism, a suspect could be charged with criminal mischief. The degree of that charge would depend on the level of damage and could reach the felony level, said Wilson.
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