AVONDALE— After bouncing back from a “massive” car wreck that tore through their original storefront, the vets at Animal Ark were forced to deal with another setback over the weekend.
A year’s worth of reconstruction apparently didn’t faze a neighborhood tagger, who spray-painted several versions of the word “DEE” in large white letters along the freshly remodeled clinic on the border of Logan Square and Avondale, 3235 N. Kedzie Ave.
The damage was marked within three to 24 hours of reopening the shop on the afternoon of May 3 — and Animal Ark’s head veterinarian said spotting the graffiti tags left her weak in the knees.
“I came up the store and I wanted to cry. Literally, we had worked so hard with the cleaning and landscaping and all those little things. To see that just takes you to your knees. It’s that overwhelming,” Jennifer Landini said Tuesday.
But the tagger known as "DEE" didn’t stop there, Landini added. He or she has been on a weekly spree over the last four months and had already hit several buildings along Kimball and Belmont avenues, including several fences, garbage dumpsters, windows, walls and at least two other businesses nearby.
Landini hopes to install cameras outside for security, but the expensive pieces of hardware are somewhat beyond the budget of her small neighborhood clinic.
“It’s so discouraging lately, I don’t know what to do,” said Landini, whose clinic sits in the 35th Ward, a ward currently in transition between an aldermanic lame duck session and an incoming freshman. The shop also sits on the border of two separate police districts.
“I’m here in the trenches,” she said.
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