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Vandals Strike Great Falls and One Business is Burglarized

By Rachel Ousley

Story Created: Feb 7, 2012 at 7:50 PM MDT

Story Updated: Feb 7, 2012 at 8:06 PM MDT

Vandals tag a number of locations around Great Falls over the weekend and one locally owned store was burglarized around the same time. Could there be a connection?

Graffiti can still be spotted around town. Mostly it is black and yellow paint, which happens to be one of the things stolen from hobby land over the weekend.

Hobby Land's owner, Pat Dyer, came in to work Monday to a disturbing sight. She explains that she leaves the cash draws in the tills open and “found them on the floor with all the money gone”.

All the doors were locked, so she began checking her security cameras. She says, “we saw some people come in and we saw some people not go out”. She has four security cameras, but they only run when the store is open because otherwise there is too much video to sift through.

However, there is no camera at the back door and its spare key is missing. Dyer believes that during a busy day Saturday someone may have taken the key, went out the back, and let themselves back in possibly Sunday while she was at church.

Motorized cars are the big ticket items missing, including one that retails $440 and another one that retails $750. About $200 dollars in cash is also gone. She hasn't finished checking the rest of her inventory, but when she heard about the vandalism over the weekend she noticed some other things missing. She says, “I checked the yellow, the black, and the white and about 16 of those colors of paint are missing”.

The library is one place in town that discovered vandalism Monday morning. Kathy Mora, Director at the Great Falls Library, describes the vandalism as profanity painted in black paint. Other places in town tagged include Central Christian Church, Pierce Carpet Mill Outlet, and the Montana School for the Deaf and Blind. However, those tags were large symbols.

Mora feels any display of vandalism on public of private property is upsetting, however she says, “to me it’s especially discouraging at the library because this place does belong to the people and I would hope that people take pride and not try and deface the property”. This isn't the first tag on the library, but the first out front where it is more visible.

While crimes like these are disheartening, there's no use crying over spilled milk. Dyer says in her 45 years of being in business she has had many items shoplifted, but never broken into. She says, “you just feel like you are being invaded”. However she is grateful things were not worse. She says, “I just decided you can’t get sick over it that you just got to let God take care of it. You can’t do anything about it”.

If you have any information concerning these crimes, please contact the Great Falls Police Department or Crime Stoppers at 727-TIPS.

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