The Justice Department charged a Kentucky woman with two federal felonies on Friday after U.S. Park Police officers said they observed her spray painting the World War II Memorial in Washington.
Melissa L. Farris, 41, of Elizabethtown, Ky., was charged with defacing federal property and destruction of a veterans’ memorial, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In a social media post, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said Ms. Farris was facing jail time of up 10 years.
According to the criminal complaint, on Thursday afternoon, Ms. Farris used orange spray paint to write “Clean Hands Dirty $” on a section of the wall on the Atlantic pavilion of the memorial, where she also sprayed green and yellow paint and splattered pink paint on adjacent stones. A U.S. Park ranger who responded to the scene also noticed foam in the fountain nearby.
Ms. Farris fled the scene, according to the complaint. But a couple of hours later, the complaint said, she posted a video of herself to a Facebook account under the name Melissa Lovewell, saying, “I was just allowed to deface Federal [expletive] property, and nobody batted an eye.” In the video, she also guessed that police would be pursuing her.
In videos posted to the same account on Friday morning, a tearful woman who appears to be Ms. Farris said she intended to turn herself in to the authorities. Ms. Pirro announced on Friday morning that Ms. Farris was in custody.
The complaint notes that just before defacing the memorial, Ms. Farris posted another video to her Facebook account saying she was “cognitively aware” of her actions and was “doing so to push my whistle-blower case into the courtroom.” It was not immediately clear what that case may involve.
It was the second time that Ms. Farris had been arrested this week, according to the complaint, which noted that she was arrested on Monday just a few blocks north of the World War II Memorial for “unlawfully camping on federal property.” The complaint noted that she was livestreaming throughout that arrest on the same Facebook account.
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