Photo courtesy of Daniel Quintanilla
Vandals struck our neighborhood last week, breaking out the back windshields of at least a dozen cars in the Bishop Arts and Kidd Springs neighborhoods.
Here are four more recent vandalism events:
Cure needs a hug, 2013
That time the city of Dallas paid Oak Cliff art collective Sour Grapes $20,000 to paint a mural on the Jefferson Viaduct, and inse-“Cure” defaced it.
Delia Jasso’s campaign against graffiti, 2009-2013
Remember when our neighborhood had two City Council districts? Delia Jasso served the old District 1 after a winning campaign that promised to clean up graffiti vandalism. Early on, she staged some cleanups with volunteer Boy Scouts and whatnot. More important, she helped start a conversation about public art that inspired the Seventh Street mural project and an infusion of new murals and graffiti-style public art in our neighborhood.
The West Jefferson tornado, 2013
In the summer of 2013 — one of the hottest on record here — a homeless guy lost it and started striking plate-glass windows along both sides of Jefferson east of Llewellyn with a metal pipe, causing thousands of dollars in damage in a few minutes. Days later, it looked like a tornado had struck.
Auto flambé, 2008
At least 24 cars burned in a February-March 2008 arson spree in our neighborhood, including eight in one February night. More than 20 cars were set afire before the Dallas Police Department made the crimes a priority, and that was only after a Dallas County deputy constable’s marked car was torched. The perpetrators, easily caught, turned out to be four teenagers, ages 14-16, who were prosecuted in juvenile court.
