Somerville Police looking for ‘BLM’ mural vandal

SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Acceptance, inclusion, a guaranteed safe space. Those became Christine McSheehy’s guiding business principles three years ago when she opened HAIR by Christine & CO in a new space on Highland Avenue.

With four magnificent windows facing the sidewalk, McSheehy wanted to make sure she got that message out there.

“I thought, what better way than to actually have something on our windows that stays,” she said.

And so McSheehy commissioned a local artist, Mandee Made, who specializes in window art, to paint a mural and to do it using house paint.

“You can’t take it off,” McSheehy said. “That will be really hard to take off. Which was the point. I wanted it to be permanent.”

But you can paint over it. And the day after Thanksgiving, before noon, the shop’s surveillance camera, situated between the two outstretched wings that make up the body of the mural, caught a man spray-painting part of it – specifically the word ‘Black’ in the phrase Black Lives Matter.

“It was pretty terrible,” McSheehy said. “I just can’t imagine somebody feeling the need to so closely after a holiday where everyone should be feeling grateful and thankful, take the time in broad daylight to deface the mural.”

The vandal’s face can clearly be seen on the surveillance video and Somerville Police are investigating the incident.

“He must obviously have, you know, hate towards the BLM movement because he could easily have wiped out a lot more,” McSheehy said.

What the vandal did wipe out was quickly repaired by the artist herself, Mandee Made.

“Thankfully she came really quickly and touched it up, not even 24 hours later,” McSheehy said.

So well did Made touch it up, it’s almost like it never happened. Only it’s hard for McSheehy to forget that it did.

“We just want to spread love here,” she said. “So it really...it stinks. It’s disappointing. that somebody would do that.”

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