There are some mallrats of a different kind, in Quesnel.
Maple Park Mall has been vacant the better part of two years, but it is not abandoned. It is owned by a land holdings company hoping to sell it, and an eye is kept on it by Secure Property Watch. It was this company’s representatives who discovered the disappointing and very expensive damage inflicted on the place by vandals, this past week.
They had been inside before but this time it was carnage in the hallways, with tens of thousands of dollars in damage left in their wake.
“It’s a facility the community has cherished for years and years, and the community won’t like to hear about all this damage. People won’t be impressed by this behaviour at all,” said one of the mallsitters, on condition of anonymity. It is an active police investigation, now. What was a nuisance has become a criminal matter.
“It’s pretty bad,” said the caretaker company’s representative. “It started in the middle of December, right around the Christmas holidays. There was a small break-in through one of the windows that had been boarded up, after being broken previously. They would get into the mall and just do a little bit of messing things up. We would barricade that window back up, then they would break into the same window. So we barricaded the window better, with more reinforcement. Then they started to use tools to get in: crowbars, saws and wire cutters. It was more of a challenge for them to get into the mall, and it was maybe five or six times they got inside.”
In one break-in, they set up a dining room table and chairs, with food brought in, and drinks pilfered from one of the stores.
“Then, this past weekend (March 18-19), they smashed windows across the front of the mall, and then they gained entry into the mall (through the broken windows), and just trashed the whole inside area.”
A backhoe was stored inside to clear snow from around the building, and the vandals smashed the windows out of that. They smashed the mirrors and glass along the corridors. They smashed the small panes of glass out of the wraparound security gates across each interior storefront. There was miscellaneous other damage as well, like smashed doorknobs and a discharged fire extinguisher.
Secure Property Watch estimates at least $50,000 in wreckage was the cost of this latest episode.
The frequency of the break-ins has yielded some clues, however. Police are actively investigating, and information is being obtained. This shopping centre, once re-opened, would be a vibrant part of the local economy, so setbacks like this hurt the entire community, and that is hopefully going to motivate people of good conscience to come forward with tidbits of information or suspicions they may have of who might be responsible.
To report information, contact the Quesnel RCMP by calling 250-992-9211 during business hours, using the Quesnel RCMP’s website (hit the Online Crime Reporting tab on the home page) to send the information online, or anonymously reporting the information to the free CrimeStoppers phone number (1-800-222-TIPS/8477) and potentially receive a cash reward (yes, you can get the money but still remain anonymous).
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