Red states and blue states are no longer a front burner issue now that the elections are behind us.
But it sure didn’t feel that way on election day for Dana Crossman and Kathryn Snyder. The Far North Dallas neighbors, who each had John McCain signs in their front yards, awoke to find that someone had painted Barack Obama’s name on both of their garages.
Both Crossman’s house and Snyder’s house face north, with their garages facing toward Arapaho Road. But no one driving along the major street could have seen Obama’s name because their street is two blocks away from the intersection of Meandering Way and
Arapaho Road.
Crossman was not even aware that her garage had been vandalized until her daughter’s classmate showed up for the morning carpool.
“I carpool a kid who lives down the street and take her to Parkhill with my daughter,” Crossman says. “That morning she knocked at the back door and asked us if we knew that we had ‘Obama’ painted on our garage. I said that Mr. Crossman wouldn’t be too happy about that. We heard about it before we saw it. They wrote ‘Obama’ in black letters on our white garage door. I looked at all the other garage doors and thought they looked like wonderful blank canvases.”
Crossman says she has no idea who marked her garage, but thinks it’s safe to assume it was someone with an opposing political view.
“We didn’t hear a thing, but we gathered it was because of our McCain sign,” Crossman says.
She says that she and her family were frustrated by the act of vandalism because they have to pay out of pocket roughly $100 to paint their garage. In spite of the frustration, Crossman says she and her family are now just trying to put the incident behind them.
Kathryn Snyder, on the other hand, has had a harder time getting things back to normal.
“They painted Obama’s name on my metal shed,” Snyder says. “I have to repaint my shed so the color will match, and that will cost me about $400. Both my parents are invalids and my mother just got out of surgery, so I don’t have the time to repaint. People should be respectful of others’ property.”
Dallas Police Lt. Barry Payne says during election times, emotions can run high all around, which can cause some people to act out.
“Stealing people’s election signs always happens, but what happened to these people isn’t normal,” Payne says. “This doesn’t happen a lot and I think it is pretty ridiculous. It is just the way some people act.”
