RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — A Richmond business is left to pick up the pieces after it was the target of vandalism Wednesday night.
The owner of Happy Trees, Josiah Ickes, said the garden outside of his business was torn up by an unidentified person around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 2.
Ickes said they got a call Wednesday night from their neighbors saying someone was destroying their plants.
A video of a potential suspect was captured by next door neighbors. In the video, you can see someone grabbing a plant and dragging it across the sidewalk.
“This was an act of violence,” Ickes said. “You know, this wasn’t that it’s one thing to steal a plant or to do something like that. It’s another thing to actually annihilate an entire garden.”
Ickes said they spent countless hours tending and manicuring the garden before the vandalism.
On Thursday afternoon, piles of dirt were on the ground and several plants were still destroyed on the sidewalk.
But amongst the destruction, a note now sits in one of the planters that reads “I’m sorry whatever happened here was taken out on the plants, I did what I could.” Ickes said it was from a community member who helped the business clean up in the immediate aftermath of the vandalism.
“There’s still community [members] that [do] care about us, and that our little oasis is important to the community,” Ickes said.
Ickes said it’ll be hard to bring the garden back to what it once was, but that isn’t going to stop them from trying.
“We’re going to build it back,” Ickes said.
