PARKLAND, Wash. — A Pierce County school is picking up the pieces after vandals attacked their building twice last weekend, leaving thousands of dollars in damage.
The fourth time in at least five months Keithley Middle School in Parkland has been targeted. Now officials are developing a plan to stop the vandals.
They don’t know who is doing this. And that’s despite having surveillance video. The damage is obvious from the street.
Plywood was covering the windows that were smashed. It is leaving kids and their parents feeling uneasy.
They are hard to miss, windows at the Keithley Middle School covered in plywood after two separate groups of people smashed them over the weekend.
“That’s actually, that’s scary,” said Christa Fisher. “I don’t know, obviously, I don’t who would vandalize the school.”
This parent says no one at the school said a word about the smashed windows. And she does not like what she sees.
“It doesn’t make people want to go to school,” Fisher said. “It doesn’t make her want to go to school because it makes her feel unsafe.”
According to the Pierce County Sheriffs, a group of what appear to be juveniles were caught on surveillance video at about 4 o’clock Sunday morning, throwing what looked like rocks into the windows. Hours later, what could be another group of vandals broke still more windows, a total of 14. Repairs likely have cost thousands of dollars.
Detectives tell us they don’t have clear images of the culprits.
“And there’s not a lot of evidence left behind,” said Sgt. Darren Moss, Jr., Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman. “And so, we’ve documented this incident. And apparently this is not the first time this has happened.”
Indeed, school officials say vandals smashed windows twice last fall in November and December. So far, no one has been caught for any of these crimes.
Sgt. Moss says finding them is imperative.
“There’s this thing called the broken windows theory,” said Sgt. Moss. “If you fix the little things, big things don’t come out of it. If you let kids get away with breaking windows or stealing things, that can lead to bigger problems in the future.”
School officials says they are also considering putting in better lighting, even putting alarms on the windows to alert the district and thwart the vandals.
So far, nothing valuable has been stolen from the school.
But something more precious has almost certainly been lost, a sense of security.
If you know anything about what happened here, you asked to call 911.
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