A group of four figures quickly made their way through Wedgwood in the middle of the night over the summer, tagging cars, garag doors and fences with various slurs and symbols written in white spray paint. UPrep Property was marked twice, on a tree and a brick wall, both on the west side of the ULab. When Director of Facilities Robert Thom made his daily walk-around the morning of Aug. 11, he noticed the damage. After cleaning up the graffiti on UPrep property, Thom checked the security cameras on that side of the building, but the figures were unidentifiable in the dark.

Thom didn’t realize the extent of the vandalism until he took a broader look around the neighborhood.

“It was much more than the tree, and it was throughout the neighborhood,” Thom said. “We were not the only people that were tagged that evening.”

According to Thom, graffiti isn’t usually a problem around Wedgwood, so the spree of vandalism was highly unusual.

“For the most part, it stays on the red houses, it’s a blank canvas. Nobody lives there,” Thom said.

Thom believes the vandalism was not specifically targeted at anyone.

“I don’t think it was necessarily directed to our school or our students,” Thom said. “I think, they obviously thought that they were having fun.”

Sophomore Ryan Ehrhardt was taken aback after seeing the graffiti.

“I don’t understand why people would think it’s funny to write a slur on a tree,” Ehrhardt said. “It isn’t clever or complex, just rude.”

The bricks on the ULab have an anti-graffiti coating, allowing for most of the spray paint to be cleaned up the next day according to Thom.

“If you were to go look very, very, very closely, you would see some residual, maybe some white paint on that brick,” Thom said. “But for the most part, it did its job in allowing us to clean it pretty darn good.”