WASHINGTON (AP) — A person has been arrested in connection with vandalism at The World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro announced Friday.
Pirro announced on X that her office was filing two felony charges against Melissa L. Farris. Pirro said the felony charges are “Depredation Against Property of the United States and Destruction of Veterans’ Memorials.” The offenses carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison.
On Thursday, the words “Clean hands dirty $” were found painted on the monument and bubbles filled a fountain.
“Vandalizing our World War II Memorial is a despicable attack on a sacred monument honoring the Americans who fought and died for our freedom. Those Americans include my father and grandfather,” Pirro wrote.
A woman identified on her Facebook page as Melissa Lovewell posted a video Thursday in which she is seen taking cans of spray paint from her bag and then painting the monument.
“I will wait here to be arrested for spraying our veterans’ fountain,” she says. “It was me, I’m doing it, it’s on camera.”
In a video posted Friday, the woman, who in a separate post said she had been in Washington for three weeks, said she was turning herself in.
The arrest warrant filed in the case indicated that witnesses took pictures of the vandalism occurring, which were circulated among U.S. Park Police officers.
One officer recognized the suspect as someone they arrested Aug. 10 “for unlawfully camping on federal property” just blocks away. She livestreamed that arrest, the warrant said.
The suspect was identified by her Kentucky driver’s license as Melissa L. Farris, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
Farris was expected to be arraigned Friday. The Public Defender’s office said she was not yet listed in the system and had not been assigned an attorney.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
The incident sparked harsh rebukes from both Pirro and President Donald Trump and comes after the president blamed damage to the nearby Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on vandals, without providing evidence. That case prompted charges against multiple people which were dropped when Pirro said evidence showed the damage came from botched repairs after Trump’s renovation at the site.
“Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals,” Trump said on Friday on his Truth Social site. “First the Reflecting Pool, now this.”
The Interior Department said that the U.S. Park Police were on the scene following the Thursday vandalism and an investigation was ongoing. “The public should know we will find the person responsible for this disgusting act,” the department said.
The Friends of the National World War II Memorial, a nonprofit organization that helps maintain the site, said: “There are many places in our country for expression, debate, and disagreement. A national memorial honoring those who served and those who never returned home should never be used as a canvas for vandalism.”
The Veterans of Foreign Wars called the vandalism “an act of profound disrespect, a slap in the face to the veterans who served and sacrificed and to the families who carried that burden at home.”
A former Olympian was charged in late July with deliberately damaging the Reflecting Pool, but the Justice Department later moved to dismiss that case, saying evidence prosecutors had received refuted the idea that vandals were to blame.
Trump sharply criticized Pirro’s assessment that damage to the Reflecting Pool was the result of shoddy construction and not the work of vandals, as he claimed.
The case dismissal was an embarrassing setback for a Justice Department that had previously echoed Trump’s claims and billed the prosecution as accountability for damage at a Washington landmark, a pet project of Trump. Pirro’s decision to drop the case was also a rare moment during Trump’s second term of an aide or political appointee openly defying him.