The Crime: Criminal Mischief
The Victims: June Monkhouse and Paul Lewis
Dates: Thursday, Dec. 20, through Thursday, Jan. 3
Time: around midnight
Place: 10000 block of Stone Canyon and 7700 block of Meadow
There’s no telling what will get under a person’s skin.
Somewhere out there, someone is seething. Day after day, they are seeing something that fills them with anger. Maybe it’s skyrocketing gas prices. Maybe it’s grown men in baggy pants, or the omnipresent election coverage.
For someone in Preston Hollow, it seems to be convertibles.
“Whoever it is, they’ve got me three times in the last two months,” June Monkhouse says.
Monkhouse owns two convertibles — a Mustang and a Chrysler — and someone appears to have something against their cloth roofs. They were both slashed open with a knife in October and November while parked outside her home, she says, and as soon as she replaced the first damaged roof, someone slashed that open, too.
“Police are telling me not to bother putting another top on it, because they’ll slash that one too,” Monkhouse says. “It’s stressing me out financially, buying these convertible roofs, but I don’t have access to a garage right now, so I don’t know what to do. I’m hoping it doesn’t rain anytime soon.”
Monkhouse is not alone in her dilemma. Between Dec. 20 and January 3, the cloth roofs of nine convertibles were slashed on Stone Canyon’s 10000 block and the adjacent 7700 block of Meadow. Some had items stolen from them, but more were left undisturbed apart from the slicing.
“It’s really just sort of baffling, really,” says Paul Lewis, whose Honda S-2000 convertible was slashed Dec. 26. “They took a knife to the roof, cut it in two different directions, but it doesn’t look like they even tried to get in to steal anything. They just slashed and went.”
This sort of criminal behavior has police officers scratching their heads as well, saying such a narrowly targeted pattern of vandalism is nearly unprecedented.
“I’m not saying that it’s never happened, but I’ve personally never come across a case where a guy is going around targeting a certain type of car,” Dallas Police Lt. Michael Woodberry says. “Sometimes, if there’s a really expensive car parked, someone might get jealous and do something like key it, let the air out of the tires. But I’ve never heard of someone going around targeting specific types of cars and having such an unusual thing he does to them.”
The only similarity between the vandalized cars, apart from their location and cloth tops, is that all were parked on a public street, driveway or somewhere apart from a garage. Unfortunately, Woodberry says, a garage is pretty much all that can stand between a convertible and a determined, knife-wielding vandal.
“Unfortunately, if you’re not in a garage, there’s not much you can do to stop them,” Woodberry says. “The fact is, some people are just mean. They’re like the bullies on a playground, except they’ve never grown out of it. And it’s tough to stop them from being mean.”
