The City STAR is 12 pages total, mostly ads. Yet on page 6 I found a news item that interested me and that I would probably never have seen anywhere else.
Two San Francisco men were arrested early Monday morning after they allegedly vandalized a Mission district business, police said Tuesday.
A business owner in the 600 block of Valencia Street allegedly saw two men using a pen to deface the front wall of his store at about 12:30 a.m.
Police said the owner confronted the men, who ran off. Responding police officers found two people who matched the description of the suspects about a block away from the business, according to police.
Scott Cuilty, 28, and Cameron Jeffries, 24, were arrested for felony vandalism and conspiracy, police said.
After finishing the laundry I went to have a look at the 600 block of Valencia. Guess what is the most prominent feature of this block?
Sad to say for Cameron and Scott, it is the MISSION POLICE STATION, one of the city's newest and largest.
Perhaps these adventurous post-college males felt protected by the fact that it is hard to find a surface on the 600 block of Valencia that has NOT been markered or sprayed or stickered.
It is felony vandalism and conspiracy all the same. Would you not think these two boys would have played enough video games and watched enough chase scenes to at least know enough to immediately split up when they began to run away? Perhaps they did not feel very threatened and so did not bother to run very sincerely or very far. Perhaps they were stumbling along in a meth haze under the impression that they were making swift progress. But it is futile to speculate. By now their parents (in Woodside or Grosse Pointe or Tiburon or Georgetown) will have been on the phone to fleets of family lawyers and the charges, we may be sure, are already in process of being reduced or dismissed.
One other curious feature of this story in the STAR is that the accused (though presumed innocent) are publicly named, while the quick-witted business-owner (whose role, by contrast, is not conjectural but an established fact) remains anonymous. Should not this neighborhood hero-with-a-cell-phone be acknowledged? This very day I could have offered my personal congratulations, if I only knew to whom to offer them.