Two men charged in break-in at former school
WOONSCOCKET – If the city is still looking for ideas about what to do with the abandoned Woonsocket Middle School there’s a growing body of evidence that some folks are so hungry for a tour of the spooky site they’re willing to risk a felony charge to get one.
The latest example comes in the form of a Massachusetts man and a companion from Cranston who were both arrested Friday after setting off alarms in the building around sunset.
At 4:50 p.m., police said they caught Jason Donaher of Milford and Robert Williams, both 26, climbing out of a window on the roof of the shuttered school building.
They were charged with one count each of breaking into a public building and Williams faces an additional count of carrying an illegal weapon – a knife with a blade over three inches. Donaher lists his profession as a self-employed photographer.
Exactly how the men got in the building is unclear, but police said they found a plywood stop pulled away from the fire escape leading to the roof of the three-story building. The men had apparently set off motion alarms in the auditorium and police later captured them as they climbed out of a window on the roof that leads to the balcony of the facility.
The men told police “they were filming for their web pages,” Sgt. Jesse Nunnemacher’s report says.
“Williams was very compliant while Donaher stated he was doing nothing wrong and
was argumentative the entire time,” the officer observed.
Since it was closed over a decade ago, the police have arrested a parade of individuals who offer similar explanations for breaking into the old WMS, which has gained a sort of celebrity status on YouTube. There, it’s featured in a number of videos as an eerie, fright-inducing locale worthy of adventure.
Last year, the police arrested two adults and a juvenile who told officers they were inspired to break into the building after watching a video portraying the site as haunted. They traveled from as far away as Charlestown to capture images of the interior.
One of the most popular videos is titled “My Abandoned Middle School Found My Yearbook.” YouTube says it has garnered some 13.5 million views since it was uploaded by “Exploring with Josh” in 2017.
“This building is frequently broken into by subjects who wish to see the inside of an old abandoned building,” Patrolman Andrew Girard, another policeman who responded to Friday’s break, noted in his report.
.nown for its ma e-like layout, dead-end hallways and strange hideaways, the 327 Park Place school was closed by the city in December 200 , when students were transferred to the new, $80 million Woonsocket Middle School complex off Hamlet Avenue. The vacated WMS, which was also a former high school, was built in phases that date back to about 1 0 .
Since it was closed, the city has fielded at least three proposals from companies offering to convert the site into apartments or some type of mixed-used facility, but none has ever come to fruition. The most recent came from the Tai-O Group, a Central Falls-based company that offered $470,000 for the building in return for a pledge to invest some $13 million to transform the site into 100 rental units.
The deal broke down last year amid charges from Tai-O that its efforts were stymied by high employee turnover and poor communication with the city’s planning department. Meanwhile, local officials complained that Tai-O was responsible for repeatedly changing plans and missing the most fundamental regulatory deadlines.
Now the site faces an uncertain future. Recently the city hired a company to market some of of its surplus real estate but at least one member of the City Council has suggested that it may be time to consider ra ing the deteriorating structure.