Man arrested after Indianapolis Masonic Temple vandalized with paint, employees threatened
INDIANAPOLIS (WRTV) — A man was arrested Monday morning for threatening employees at the Indianapolis Masonic Temple and vandalizing the building with red spray paint, causing $5,000 in damage, according to police.
Police say at 10:50 a.m., officers were dispatched to 525 N. Illinois Street on the report of vandalism in progress. When officers arrived, Lynn Jackson was sitting on the steps of the building, waiting for the police to arrive.
Jackson spray-painted several red streaks and symbols of undetermined meaning on the interior and exterior of the building. He also spray-painted a sentence on the east side of the building that reads: “Geometry provides no begin only expands middle.” The man also vandalized the Scottish Rite Cathedral across the street, smashing windows and spraying graffiti there.
“Some bizarre, vaguely anti-Freemason statement of some kind,” Chris Hodapp said, President of the Masonic Library and Museum of Indiana. “We haven’t figured out yet quite what it was he was trying to say.”
Hodapp, the author of “Freemasons for Dummies,” says the organization’s mission is to improve the world by improving one person at a time. But the man who vandalized the building has a different view of the group.
“He said his father had been a Mason and his father had been turned evil by the Freemasons,” Hodapp said. “He had all these bizarre statements he was making.”
Hodapp said the suspect was able to get inside the building because a door had been left propped open.
“He managed to get here into the hallway and proceeded to paint over 100-year-old pictures and paint the marble walls and spray paint a piece of statuary in the front hall.”
Security guard Tiffany Robinson confronted the man, who then expressed strong anti-Freemason views.
“He was saying that he hates the Masons; he wished they were dead, they need to be put in a grave,” Robinson said. “So I called the police.”
The suspect told Robinson he was going to sit outside and wait for police. When police arrived, they took him into custody.
Hodapp thinks the process of fixing the damage is expected to be a bigger obstacle than the cost.
Charges
According to online court records, Jackson faces charges of intimidation, a low-level felony, and criminal vandalism, a misdemeanor.
Jackson is set to appear in the Marion County court on Friday at 9 a.m.
