Warning: Gross story, gross picture. Read at your own risk. - Ed.
A serial poop vandal is at large in Delhi. In February, employees of three local businesses found nasty surprises in their bathrooms: cheery messages and random scrawls painted in feces.
So far, the vandal has struck a Sunoco, a McDonalds, and an Express Mart in the village of Delhi in Delaware County without being apprehended.
Eva-Rae Andrews, a part-time clerk at the Country Store at the Delhi Sunoco, was the first to discover the evidence in the store’s bathroom. She snapped a photo of the perpetrator’s smiley-face message on the mirror, which appears below.
A smiley face made of feces in the Country Store bathroom. Photo by Eva-Rae Andrews.
“It was all over the walls, all over the mirror, and someone has shoved it into one of the electrical sockets,” she said. “It was pretty bad.”
Another clerk at the Country Store, Carmen Cappiello, said the “poopy painter” actually blew a fuse by stuffing feces into the power outlet.
“I think smearing it over and mushing it over the outlet caused the circuit to blow,” she said. “It was on the floor with toilet paper, on the paper towel rack. The whole bottom rim of that mirror, and against the wall -- it’s all smeared all over that.”
In a bathroom at the McDonald’s, Cappiello said, the perp wrote “I [heart] you.”
Michael Mills, the chief of the Delhi Police Department, is working with the State Police in the search for the perpetrator, who could face charges of criminal mischief, criminal tampering, and disorderly conduct.
“This is really disturbing behavior, obviously,” said Mills.
Mills said he believes that the subject is a young white adult male, about 5’10” tall. He hit the McDonald’s on the morning of February 6, and the Sunoco’s Country Store at lunchtime on the same day. He targeted the Express Mart a few days later.
The Country Store doesn’t have security cameras in its bathroom, Cappiello said. Still, by studying the footage from cameras in the main store, she says that she thinks the suspect did the dirty deed in just about five minutes. She suspects he brought the poop in with him.
“It’s a new store. We just opened on November 8,” Cappiello said. “If I was going to christen the store I could think of better ways to do it.”
8:02 pm Correction: The original version of this story misspelled Carmen Cappiello's last name.
