ROSEWOOD HEIGHTS – Nearly 150 people on social media have shared a still-frame image of a young man appearing to be spraying a fire extinguisher at a home on Westerholdt in Rosewood Heights.
Originally posted by Facebook user, Rose Badasch, said the spraying was the latest in a long line of incidents in the neighborhood. She posted the still-frames and made them public for sharing. She said they were taken from a surveillance video feed from her son's house, where the incident took place at 3:26 a.m. Tuesday morning.
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“He's gone to Madison County to file reports, but not much has been done,” Badasch said via Facebook Messenger. “When they show up, it's at random times in the middle of the night.”
Captain Mike Dixon of the Madison County Sheriff's Office said the incident has not been reported to his department. He searched for, and subsequently found, the images on Facebook Wednesday morning and said he was not sure exactly what charges could be pressed against the young man who is as of now unknown to authorities.
“We may be able to file a criminal damage to property, but I'm not sure how that would stand, since the fire extinguisher powder could just be washed away,” Dixon said. “We had some people out that way use fire extinguishers to vandalize that church – St. Kevin's – and they did about $30,000-$40,000 in damages, and the majority of that was from cleaning the fire extinguisher mess.”
Dixon, however, was more interested in where the young man got the fire extinguisher.
“That's a little fire extinguisher,” he said. “It probably came off a fishing boat or an AT&T truck or something. The law states fishing boats require small fire extinguishers on board. People can grab them out of boats in people's backyards. I bet right now there is a fishing boat missing its fire extinguisher. If people in the area check, we may get a burglary call about that.”
Trespassing could also be a charged faced by this young man if he is identified and the homeowner decided to do so. Anyone with any information on this young man's identity is asked by Basdasch to contact the Madison County Sheriff's Office, which can be reached at (618) 692-6087.
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