Police nab two more taggers

They interviewed the victim, and talked to other residents in the area. One turned out to be a friend and fellow graduate from Lick’s The Dalles-Wahtonka High School class of 2007.

The male classmate already had Lick’s phone number, and “I just said, ‘If you see anything let me know,’” Lick said.

A few minutes later, the man called Lick with a tip on the tagger’s location and Lick and Simonds headed to the location where the two teens, 13 and 14-year-old boys, were spotted behind a house. As the officers walked toward the house, four or five people were helpfully pointing out the youths’ location, Simonds said. Meanwhile, the teens started walking along the side of the house, heading right for the officers.

“Luckily, they walked right into us,” Simonds said. “It couldn’t have been any easier.” The two teens were caught just a block due north of where the victim originally called to complain that someone had spray-painted a rock outcropping behind her house with orange and black paint, Simonds said.

Simonds was generous in his praise of Lick. “Joe was the lynchpin along with the citizen who called and made this happen. I was just along for the ride.”

Lick said catching the teens “was great. It felt pretty good” to make arrests on a problem that “everybody’s so concerned about.”

Lick, who had been a reserve officer for nine months before getting hired on, said he was hooked on law enforcement from his first shift as a reserve. “I like the work that you do where you can actually make a difference,” he said.

He’d spent seven years working at the AT&T store in The Dalles before joining the police force.

One of the teens had already been arrested in February for graffiti, said The Dalles Police Chief Jay Waterbury. He said the months-long spate of graffiti in The Dalles is the worst he can remember in his nearly 40 years here.

The only worse crime spree he can recount was in the 1980s when a bunch of hood ornaments — over 400 — were stolen.

Lick and Simonds asked the two teens why they did it. They said, “’We felt like doing it,’” Simonds recounted.

“We kind of gave them a speech hoping they would understand,” Lick said. “Nobody likes to go out in the morning seeing their own stuff vandalized, where they’d have to pay their own money to get it fixed, but I don’t think it set in with them.”

Lick said when the teens’ moms were called to the scene, both were “upset” with their kids, Lick said. As for the mom of the teen who’d been arrested before, “she was yelling at him pretty good,” Lick said.

The teens said they got the spray-paint from their parent’s garages, Simonds said.

An arrest means paperwork, of course, and consequently, Lick was late for Easter dinner.

“They were like, ‘What happened?’ [I said] ‘Actually, we got a couple taggers,’ and they were like, ‘Ok, you’re good.’”