Behind the Badge
The mother of two is just an West Fullerton mom who is fed up with taggers defacing property in her neighborhood.
So when she saw a teen-ager getting ready to spray paint her truck on Saturday, she decided to get the youngster’s attention and stop him.
“I hit the window and it made a loud pop noise,” she said in an interview Monday evening. “He just looked at me and smiled.”
When she went outside, he defiantly spray painted the sidewalk, made an obscene gesture and cursed at her before getting on his skateboard and riding away.
Determined not to let him get away, she jumped in her truck and gave chase. As she winded through the streets after the skater, she came across a pedestrian bridge and knew that was her last chance to corner him, so she turned the truck to block him.
“I dead ended him into the curb,” she said.
She got out of the truck, and he went running again. She asked a passerby to help but he couldn’t stop the teen, so the woman tackled him to the ground and asked the passerby to dial 911.
She emptied the teen’s backpack, which was full of spray paint cans, and then Fullerton police officers arrived and took him into custody.
While not everyone would go to such lengths to catch a tagger, she is modest about what she did.
“I’m a little surprised by all of this,” she said of the attention.
