Teen arrested for vandalizing Soldiers Memorial in red paint
Michael Lawrence, 18, has been arrested, but it's not clear what charged Lawrence faces. St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department have not released any other information.
In a tweet, police say "Relative to the vandalism at Soldier’s Memorial during the overnight hours between 1/5/20 and 1/6/20, officers arrested 18-year-old Michael Lawerence."
The paint has since been cleaned off the sides of the downtown memorial.
The recently renovated Soldiers Memorial in downtown St. Louis was vandalized, apparently, sometime overnight Saturday.
As he was cleaning he was asked to stop and told a contractor was coming out to clean the paint off.
There was an anti-war rally and march downtown Saturday, but a guard at the memorial tells KMOX it broke up at about 2 p.m. Saturday.
He says the vandalism apparently happened either late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. There were protests in St. Louis this past weekend over a potential war with Iran.
The memorial reopened in November 2018 after a two-year, $30 million renovation. It was open to the public, as usual, Sunday morning.
Demonstrators in dozens of cities around the U.S. gathered Saturday to protest the Trump administration's killing of an Iranian general and decision to send thousands of additional soldiers to the Middle East.
More than 70 planned protests were organized by CODEPINK and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, a U.S.-based anti-war coalition, along with other groups.
From Tampa to Philadelphia and San Francisco to New York, protesters carried signs and chanted anti-war slogans.
A few hundred demonstrators gathered in Times Square on Saturday chanting “No justice, no peace, U.S. out of the Middle East!”
“The United States is trying to use Iraq as a proxy war,” said Russell Branca, 72, of Queens. “If the United States and Iran are going to fights it’s not going to be in the United States and it’s not going to be in Iran, it’ll be in other places. And it’s just crazy because none of this is necessary.”
In Minneapolis, protesters gathered near the University of Minnesota holding signs and chanting. Among them was Meredith Aby, a longtime leader of the local Anti-War Committee.
"We need to be pulling out of Iraq, not sending thousands more troops. We need to be trying to cool things down with Iran, not pouring gasoline on a fire,” Aby, 47, said.
