Portland police on Tuesday arrested a 40-year-old Portland man for allegedly slashing the tires of at least 15 cars in a downtown parking garage over the previous three days.
Dejuan Marquese Graham is being held on $5,000 cash bail at the Cumberland County Jail on one count of aggravated criminal mischief, a Class C felony, for puncturing tires on vehicles parked at the Casco Bay Lines garage on Commercial Street, said Portland police Lt. James Sweatt.
The garage, which is co-owned by the city and provides mainland parking spaces to residents of Peaks Island as well as the public, had dealt with tire slashings before, said Steve Kalisz of MHR management. MHR owns 51 percent of the garage and the city owns the remainder.
Several cars were vandalized in January at the garage and at other locations, but police never made an arrest.
Currently, police have charged Graham only with the vandalism from this past weekend. Kalisz said the slashings subsided for several months during a construction project, when many more people, including garage staff, were at the garage during the daytime. The extra people in the garage helped keep things quiet, but when the majority of work stopped before Memorial Day, Kalisz said the vandalism started up again.
“We started getting hit again and more often,” he said.
This month, the city and MHR tripled the number of surveillance cameras around the garage, at a cost of about $18,000, which will be paid with garage revenue, said Jessica Grondin, a city spokeswoman.
Kalisz said his staff had only finished working out most of the kinks in the security system before it helped catch Graham, he said.
Many of the victims had theorized that the vandal was slashing the tires after dark, so Kalisz said he scoured nighttime footage, but to no avail.
After honing in on four cars parked next to one another that each had tires slashed and whose parking spaces were clearly shown on video, Kalisz reviewed the hours of footage to discover that Graham had entered the garage in broad daylight, and was found to have slashed four tires on four consecutive cars after noontime on Saturday.
“This guy is really bold; he’s doing this right in the middle of the frickin’ day,” Kalisz said. “He came into the garage about 12-something through the elevator lobby, and that’s where we got the first good picture. He went up, and worked his way down.”
Kalisz gave the photo to police Monday evening, and two officers said they recognized the man, Kalisz said. Sweatt said there is no indication why Graham targeted the garage or slashed tires.
Coley Mulkern, a Peaks Island resident whose tires were slashed while he was parked in the garage over the weekend, said he had replaced the entire set of tires on his car only a couple of days before, at a cost of about $500.
When told that a perpetrator had been caught, Mulkern shouted in celebration.
“Thank God,” he said, after hearing of Graham’s arrest. “That is so great.”
Graham has a criminal record in Maine. He was convicted of criminal mischief in 2007, violating a protective order in 2009, and theft in 2012, for which he was ordered to pay $12,000 in restitution, according to the State Bureau of Identification.
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