Brian Goad
Reporter
September 2, 2005
Chad Parker was quite surprised to find that his car had been vandalized on Sunday afternoon.
Parker, a married student who lives in the married student apartments, parked his Toyota Celica in the parking lot behind Williams, just across the street from his apartment on Friday. After a weekend of not needing to use the vehicle, Chad Parker discovered the damage done to the car only after his friend Graham Johnson went out to retrieve his post office box keys. Johnson found the small right rear window shattered and the lock damaged.
“At first I thought that someone had busted it with their arm or a baseball bat,” Johnson said. Parker and Johnson examined it closer and realized that something else had done the damage.
“It looked like it was a screwdriver,” Parker said.
Parker called the Elizabethton Police, and Patrol Officer Jerry Bradley was dispatched later that evening. The police report filed estimated the damage to the window and lock at about $350. “It appeared that someone had attempted to enter the locked vehicle by tampering with the door lock and popping out the side window,” the report said.
According to Parker, he was unsure as to why his car was targeted. Parker explained that he did not have anything of value in it: a pinhole camera that looked like a plain wooden box, a black, worn-out skateboard, a magazine and a few compact discs, yet nothing was taken out of his car.
“It doesn’t look like the job was ever finished,” said Parker. “It was not very organized or thought out.” Parker thinks it was probably juveniles who did this damage.
When asked about what measures would be taken to prevent such vandalism, Mark Fox, dean of students, replied by stating that there is nothing the school can do to guarantee that this would not happen again. “All we can do is report it to the police, and what they will do is make sure to add extra patrol during their rounds around campus.” He said that they have informed security to be on the lookout for anything unusual.