Police arrest teen suspected of damaging school with graffiti in Fort Worth suburb
Southlake police have arrested a 17-year-old they say may have been involved in previous graffiti at school campuses in the area.
Officers responded to a motion detection alert about 3:30 a.m. Monday at the front door of Carroll High School in the 800 block of North White Chapel Road, a police department news release said.
When officers arrived, they saw a young man in a gray hooded sweatsuit run away and they gave chase, the release said.
The officers were able to catch the suspect, Wyatt Chappel, near the school shortly after the chase began. Officers saw that multiple glass doors and windows throughout the building were broken or damaged, and there was extensive damage caused by fire extinguishers inside the building, police said.
Chappell faces burglary of a building, criminal mischief, between $30,000 and $150,000, and evading arrest charges and he’s been transferred to the Tarrant County Jail, police said.
Investigators believe this suspect may be connected to prior graffiti offenses that occurred on Carroll Independent School District property during the summer, the release said.
Two Carroll ISD school buildings were found to be marked up with graffiti earlier in September, and Southlake police were looking for the masked person believed to be responsible for this incident and two other instances of vandalism at district schools.
There was spraypainted graffiti on both Carroll High School and Durham Intermediate School buildings, police said in a news release posted on Twitter. The crime is “classified as a state jail felony offense due to the extent of the graffiti,” police said.
This occurred after graffiti was discovered at Carroll Senior High School on Aug. 24, according to Officer Brad Uptmore, a police spokesman. About four months before that, on May 25, there was also graffiti at the senior high school, he said in an email on Sept. 4.
“At this point in the investigation,” he said in the email, “we believe the same person is responsible for each of the above-listed offenses based on the information we have at this time.”
The department didn’t describe what was depicted in the graffiti, though it appeared to be red words in one of the security images released by police. Uptmore said police “won’t be commenting about the content of the graffiti” since it’s part of an ongoing investigation.
The suspect in the September graffiti incidents was captured in security images in a gray Columbia jacket, black joggers, black gloves and black tennis shoes. Police released the photos on Twitter in the hopes someone might be able to identify the person.
This story includes information from Star-Telegram archives.
This story was originally published September 14, 2020 at 12:36 PM.
