MT. MORRIS TOWNSHIP -- At Trinity Assembly of God on Mt. Morris Road, there are signs volunteers are cleaning up the mess left behind by vandals. It’s been four days since a couple of teenagers ransacked the place.
“It hits you pretty hard,” Pastor Larry Alverson said. “It's hard to imagine that someone would do that kind of thing to a church. All we try to do is help people."
Pastor Alverson said the vandalism happened early Saturday morning. The perpetrators broke into the barn that housed the church buses.
“They wrote a bunch of epithets all over the wall with paint, and all over the buses,” Alverson said. He added the teenagers tried to light the vehicles and the barn on fire. Then, he said, they apparently moved to the main building and broke into the church's activity room, which set off the motion-detector alarm.
When the church's key-holder arrived with police, they found the two teenagers in the room.
“There was glass all over the floor,” Alverson said, from the vending machine the boys raided.
“They had pop cans and potato chip wrappers and candy wrappers all over the floor.”
Alverson said that was the boys' eventual undoing once they fled.
“By the time it got light, we had a path showing exactly where they went to get off the property,” Alverson said. Police arrested the boys within eight hours of the first call. Charges are pending. One boy is in county jail; the other was released to his mother.
“It just breaks your heart when you see that kind of thing,” Alverson said.
He estimated the cost of damage is around $15,000. Alverson said if the boys ever apologize, he would forgive them.
