Mission Hill man held in weeks-old vandalism case
For weeks, it seemed as if no building, front door, or school in Mission Hill was immune to defacing with graffiti by someone known as Tel. Angry residents called police, the mayor's office, and their city councilor to complain about the spray-painting public nuisance.
"This kid had graffiti all over the place," said City Councilor Michael Ross, who represents Beacon Hill, Back Bay, and Mission Hill. "A lot of people knew this guy's name because it was spray-painted everywhere."
Police said they arrested Tel, whom they identified yesterday as Andrew White, a 20-year-old from the Mission Hill section of Roxbury, early Saturday during a predawn undercover operation.
At about 3:15 a.m, two plainclothes officers were patrolling in the area of Burney Street. One officer observed White and Kelsey Krug , a 19-year-old from Sudbury, as they walked from Burney Street to the nearby Maurice J. Tobin Elementary School.
At the school, Krug allegedly stood lookout while White painted on a door at the back of the school, said Captain Paul Russell, commander of Area B-2, which encompasses Mission Hill. Police stopped the two men as they walked by the Mission Main housing development. Officers found six cans of spray paint and noticed black paint smudges on White's hands. At the school, police found a freshly painted "Tel" in black, painted on the door.
"He admitted to officers that he is Tel," Russell said.
Krug and White were arrested and are scheduled to be arraigned this morning in Roxbury District Court, Russell said.
Police declined to give more details on the operation, which is ongoing.
Dot Joyce, press secretary of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, applauded the arrests and encouraged the public to report graffiti by calling 617-635-4500 . She said city workers clean up most graffiti within a week.
"It's important to our neighborhoods and the people in those neighborhoods that their buildings sidewalks and communities are clean and safe," she said. Boston has long grappled with graffiti, primarily in Mission Hill and the Back Bay, which Ross said costs the city thousands of dollars every year to clean up. Last year, the city created Graffiti Busters, a taxpayer-funded program that provides free cleanup and operates as a division of the city's Department of Property Management and Construction. Resident groups, such as the Back Bay's Graffiti NABBers, have also worked to curtail the problem.
Kathleen Alexander, a real estate agent and cochairwoman of Graffiti NABBers, short for Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, applauded the arrest.
"This is a city wide problem, and usually if they are tagging one area, they'll eventually move to another," she said. "One of our condo associations had to pay $10,000 last year just to remove graffiti from their building, so the cost to neighborhoods is huge."
Alexander said Graffiti NABBers members usually sit in on the arraignments and other court proceedings of people arrested for graffiti. "We want them to know that there are victims," she said.
Saturday evening, residents living near Burney Street in Mission Hill expressed surprise that the suspect lives nearby.
"Can you believe it?" said Robert Francey , a resident of Delle Avenue, pointing from his porch toward Burney Street. Francey has waged a one-man campaign to paint over the graffiti marking the red-brick brownstones on his street.
"I grew up in this neighborhood and have seen a lot of changes, so it's very hard for me to sit around and watch this graffiti," he said. "It's one layer of an onion that has been peeled back. Before we had muggings, drug dealing, car break-ins, stuff like that. This is just another layer that needs to be defeated, like those other things. It's cute when you're carving 'Larry loves Suzy' on a tree, but it's another thing when you're tagging people's homes."
Another resident, Kat Fischer , 49, said Tel has tagged her building three times in the past six weeks. She said taggers should be made to do community service, specifically cleaning graffiti off buildings.
Ross said: "It's a myth that there's some art component to it."
Michael Levenson of the Globe staff contributed to this report. 