A street sign was taken out of the ground and large rocks were put on the road on Raymond Street, mostly near Tulip Tree Lane in vandalism overnight from Thursday, Dec. 17 to Friday, Dec. 18.
Darien police said they found some adult teenagers in the area who might have committed the vandalism, but they didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest, so the men were released after questioning that night.
The vandals, whoever they were, had put at least one street sign and various large rocks on the roadway. Police rolled them off. Mailboxes were also damaged.
(The police report of the incident didn’t mention that any ambulance or patrol car or a vehicle driven by any volunteer firefighter rushing to the scene in that neighborhood was disabled by any of the objects put on the road. We know of no calls for assistance for any of those first responders in that neighborhood at that time. But any of that could have happened if police hadn’t been alerted and hadn’t arrived at the scene to clear the roads.)
Police gave this account of the incident:
At about midnight, police received a call about a possible car accident after a resident on Raymond Street heard a noise. (This article links street names and intersections to Google Maps; pins in those maps are a quirk of that website; they don’t indicate exact locations of anything related to this article.)
When the caller looked out the window, he or she told police, three figures could be seen lurking on the dark street. There was a car on the street, but the caller wasn’t able to describe it.
When police went to the scene, they at first only found a “Neighborhood Watch” sign was on the ground. Not far away, a street sign for Musket Lane had been taken down and was on the ground. A street sign for nearby Red Rose Circle, along with the pole and cement bottom attached to it were found laying across Raymond Street.
Two large rocks from a stone wall of a residence on Raymond Street had been taken and put on the roadway. Another large rock was found on Raymond Street near Cliff Avenue. The police report described the large stones as “boulders.”
A mailbox for a house on Raymond Street was removed from its post, and seven other mailboxes on the street were seen opened, although they didn’t appear damaged.
More police officers were called to the area and checked nearby streets for signs of vandalism, and some of the officers saw two white males crouching behind trees on Tokeneke Road near Harriet Lane at about 12:30 a.m. They ran west on Tokeneke Road when they saw police patrol cars.
A few minutes later, another officer saw a young man walking west on Tokeneke Road near Driftway Lane (a block to the west). The man, 19 years old and a Darien resident, said he had been walking with two friends who ran when they saw the patrol car.
He said the three were coming from a house near Trader Joe’s and were walking to a home on Old King’s Highway South (if so, they were taking a roundabout route to get there — here’s the direct route to the nearest point on Old King’s Highway South, and if they’d been going to a house on Old Kings Highway North, then they’d already passed it).
When speaking to the 19-year-old, police saw a white male and a black male walking west on Tokeneke Road. These were not the pair that a police officer had originally seen on the road. Both males had an odor of alcohol about them; each was an 18-year-old, the white man from Darien, the black man from Stamford. Police were told that these were the two that the 19-year-old said he was with and who had run when they had seen the patrol car.
After questioning the three, police didn’t have reason to accuse them of the vandalism, but police did call the parents of the 18-year-olds, and the parents went to the scene to take them away. The 19-year-old didn’t show any sign of intoxication, and police released him.
Police didn’t again see a pair of white males walking in the area, and they checked to see whether or not some kind of under-age party with alcohol was going on in the neighborhood, but neither was found.
The town Department of Public Works was notified about the damage to the street signs.