Vandals strike ‘church that feeds people’ for third time in a year, WA reverend says

For the third time in less than a year, a vandal struck a Washington church — using a fire extinguisher to wreak havoc inside.

Rev. David Marshall woke to a call from a security company about a break-in at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Shoreline around 2:15 a.m. March 18, he told McClatchy News during a phone interview. Security footage showed a man inside spraying a fire extinguisher he took off the sanctuary’s wall.

“I mean there was just fog — this white fog from the fire extinguisher... when I saw it on the surveillance camera, it looked like the room was on fire,” Marshall said. “And then I realized it was just somebody standing there spraying the fire extinguisher.”

The man also “threw rocks and paving stones” through the glass doors at church’s entrance, walked inside and removed his shoes, then went inside the kitchen and turned on the fire suppression system, Marshall said.

“It’s a very dramatic thing to pull that handle — a whole bunch of chemicals spray into the air and onto the stove,” Marshall said.

A suspect has been arrested, Marshall said, but King County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately return a request for more information from McClatchy News.

Known as the “church that feeds people,” the congregation’s feeding program offers free meals, now pre-packaged due to the COVID-19 pandemic, at the church and volunteers also deliver meals to homeless encampments weekly, according to its website.

“We can’t use the kitchen until it’s been cleaned,” Marshall said. “So we had to scramble and figure out how to prepare a meal with no kitchen. We’ve never missed a Tuesday in all of those 11 years.”

The man finished his vandalism in the sanctuary, where he grabbed the fire extinguisher and sprayed it all over the place.

”It got all over everything — the floors, the chairs — and unfortunately it’s ... corrosive to metal and we have a pipe organ in that room and the whole organ is going to have to be disassembled and cleaned and reassembled,” Marshall said.

The damage will forced the church to not livestream services for two weeks, including this coming Sunday. Instead, the church will pre-record the services, including the Palm Sunday celebration.

Clean-up will cost $18,000, but the organ will cost somewhere “in the $50,00 range” to repair, Marshall said.

Marshall said they plan to reopen the church on April 4, Easter Sunday.

This is the third time the church has been targeted since April last year, when someone stole the cross off the church’s roof. It was never recovered, so the church has commissioned the artist to make a new one.

The church was hit a second time in May when the suspect broke in through a window in the church’s office and “thoroughly destroyed everything,” Marshall said.

Before this recent string of vandalism, there was only one other incident Marshall could think of that took place eight years ago when someone stole the sound system.

Marshall doesn’t believe the incidents involve the same suspect considering the “different behavior” displayed in each incident. He says because the church is close to “not a great part of town” on Aurora Avenue, the increase likely has to do with a deterioration of people’s circumstances.

“I can’t help but think the pandemic and the economic crisis and the homelessness ... it’s created an environment where more of these things happen,” Marshall said.

One silver lining, Marshall said, is the outpouring of help and support from the community. The church was able to round up five pork roasters from volunteers to cook chili and keep the Tuesday streak alive.

“This is a real sign of love, of people coming together in hard times to make a difference. And that’s a real hopeful thing that happened here,” Marshall said.

This story was originally published March 24, 2021 at 6:17 PM with the headline "Vandals strike ‘church that feeds people’ for third time in a year, WA reverend says."