VANDAL TARGETS STARS & STRIPES
Arlington shop’s American flag burned
Arlington cops are investigating the burning of an American flag that had been attached to a longtime local family business.
Officer Alex Stotik was on routine patrol shortly after 6 a.m. yesterday when he saw the flag on fire outside Minute Man Repair on Massachusetts Avenue, Arlington police Capt. Jim Curran said.
Stotik called the fire department, but by the time firefighters arrived, they found only “remnants of the burned flag on the ground,” Deputy fire Chief James Bailey said. The flagpole, which was attached to the building, was also burned, Bailey said.
“It’s certainly an act of vandalism,” said Curran, who urged anyone with information to contact police at 781-643-1212. “I think all Americans get upset when they see something like that. The flag represents all of us.”
Detectives are reviewing surveillance video from the store’s five cameras and others in the area in the hopes of identifying the culprit.
“They want to make sure the owner wasn’t personally targeted,” Curran said. “Him and his wife are just real good people. And they can fix anything.”
Eddie Gilbert, who has owned the shop for 40 years with his wife Beth, called the burning an “irresponsible act” that could have burned down the entire building.
When they put up the flag, they sprayed it with flame retardant, he said, “so whoever did it must have worked at it to get it to burn.”
By the time Gilbert and his wife arrived at work, whatever may have been left of the flag was gone.
“You could just see where burning pieces of it had dripped onto the sidewalk,” he said.
He and his wife aren’t known for their political views, Gilbert said, so he wonders whether the burning was a reaction to last weekend’s violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where a neo-Nazi is accused of driving his car into a group of counter-demonstrators, killing one and injuring 19.
A flag has hung outside their store since it first opened, he said, and in all that time, neither they nor their store has ever been the target of any vandalism or harassment.
After Gilbert had heart surgery in June, he received more than 1,000 get-well cards from customers, he said, and several visited him in the hospital.
And within hours of word getting out about the burning of their flag, a new one turned up outside their shop, courtesy of the decorated Marine who owns the lock shop next door, along with two other flags — one from the town and another from the local Veterans of Foreign Wars.