By Jessie Burchette
jburchette@salisburypost.com
KANNAPOLIS ó The Rev. Marler Starnes stood in his ransacked church Monday and struggled to come to grips with what happened.
On Saturday night, vandals struck Friendship Freewill Baptist Church at 509 W. 22nd Street
A deacon arriving Sunday morning found a glass door smashed with a concrete block.
Starnes said Monday that nothing was taken. The vandals left computers, including laptops, soundboards and other valuable items.
It wasn’t a robbery.
“They just trashed the church. They didn’t steal anything,” said Starnes, who founded the church in 1986. “It’s just a mess. They trashed the whole building. They turned everything upside down.”
Everything was upended, thrown or dumped. Angel statues lay in pieces.
The vandals plugged a sink and turned on the water in the nursery. Water was several inches deep by Sunday morning.
And they discharged a fire extinguisher, spraying a white powder over much of the church.
Church members arriving Sunday morning were stunned.
The building was such a mess services were cancelled.
A professional cleaning company arrived Monday afternoon to begin work.
Starnes said the church hopes to have the sanctuary clean and ready for the Sunday service.
“The rest of the building will take longer,” Starnes said. Normally, the church holds a service on Wednesday night, but that has been cancelled this week.
Several area churches and a lot of people in the community have offered help.
While the effort is underway to clean up the building, law enforcement officers are trying to find the culprits.
Starnes is convinced it’s the work of teenagers. He said nobody who has ever left the church would trash it.
“It’s just kids,” said Starnes.
And he’s not looking for revenge.
“I would like to see them come to the church and apologize … do some kind of community service,” he said.
And he has a question he wants to ask them face to face: “Why would you do something like this?”
Starnes, a Kannapolis native and former painting contractor who entered the ministry in 1984, sees the trashing of his church as yet another example of the decline of values and morality.
Police estimate the damage at $1,000.
No estimate was available on the cost of cleaning up the mess.
Capt. Pat Patty of the Kannapolis Police Department said break-ins at churches typically involve theft of equipment.
“This was a little different,” Patty said.
Anyone with information on the vandalism at Friendship Freewill Baptist Church is asked to call the Kannapolis Police Department at 704-920-4000.