The sabotage of a beloved Seaside garden has police asking: Why?

David Schmalz here, with some disturbing news to report.

On Wednesday, Aug. 28 at around 10:30am, an unidentified man wreaked havoc on the beloved community garden at Seaside’s Capra Park that, since 2020, volunteers have transformed into a flourishing gem of pollinator-friendly plants and vegetables that are free for the community to take. 

What’s more, a Seaside Public Works employee was present the whole time. 

In a video that I reviewed earlier today, taken by a neighbor’s camera, the actions that took place are in the distance and not easy to make out. 

But here’s what I can confirm from watching the video: As the city employee is in the park—a Seaside Public Works truck is clearly visible parked along Luzern Street—a white sedan pulls up along Sonoma Avenue and two men get out. 

After greeting the employee—one offered a handshake and the other a fist bump—they talked by the picnic table for about three or four minutes. One of the men, wearing a white shirt, picks up a shovel and starts laying waste to the garden, tossing dirt to and fro. 

Initially, the employee just stands by watching, then starts wheeling what looks to be a grill toward the city truck, while the other man, who’s wearing a black shirt, just stands by watching it all. 

The mayhem continues for another few minutes, where the white-shirted man can be seen ripping up plants with his hands and throwing them, sometimes spiking them to the ground. 

The employee then returns and starts wheeling a second grill to the truck, and while they’re doing that, the white-shirted man takes the garden’s compost bin and throws it toward the adjacent basketball court. 

The two men then walk to the city truck to meet the employee for a moment—the white-shirted man gives them a fist bump—and then the black-shirted man, who’d destroyed nothing and was just an accomplice, picks up a picnic umbrella and brings it to the employee. 

It was a wild incident, in broad daylight, and landed as a shock to the volunteers from Friends of Seaside Parks, aka FOSPA, a nonprofit that’s been transforming Seaside’s pocket parks in recent years with weekend volunteer gardening events. 

The incident came up in public comment at Seaside’s City Council meeting last night, Sept. 5, and among those who spoke was Beth Rocha, a city employee, but she spoke in the capacity of a community volunteer who helped plant and care for the park, which she started doing in 2020 out of frustration due to layoffs created by the pandemic. 

FOSPA volunteers rallied this past Saturday to clean up the mess, mend what they could and put some fresh plants in. And given the destruction shown in the video, I was surprised at how good the garden looks now when walking through it this afternoon—aside from some dead sunflower stalks hanging on a trellis, which it looked like volunteers put there, and the lack of ripe vegetables—it barely looks like a recent crime scene. 

The city is engaged in both a personnel investigation of the employee and a criminal investigation of the vandalism, and Police Chief Nick Borges says his department already has suspects, and is confident the case will be solved soon. The question he and so many others have is: Why?

“At this point, I would just say to the primary suspect, just run yourself in, just come on down and tell us why,” Borges says. “We’re going to solve this case.”

Borges says that Capra Park has long held a special place in the community, well before his time, but for many years, he says, the park was dilapidated, and only started rebounding in 2017, when the city and volunteers started putting work into it. (An aside: he says that even when stores were getting robbed all over town, the adjacent Nation’s Market is one of the only markets in Seaside that’s never been robbed.)

The most challenging aspect of the investigation will perhaps be whether to bring felony charges, which would come if the investigating officer assesses the damage is over $1,000. 

“I’ve never been trained to put a dollar value on an eggplant,” Borges says, adding that it will be hard to put a value on all the volunteer hours that went into making the garden. 

“This really isn’t your average vandalism,” he adds. “This is a very unique case, and the reason it cuts deeper is because it's a community volunteer park.”

Borges says he’s very surprised no one called his department the day it happened—“If we got called that day, we probably could have wrapped it up that day,” he says—though he can neither confirm nor deny whether the Public Works employee informed police that day.

As for whether that employee has been put on leave, City Attorney Sheri Damon says it’s not something the city can disclose.

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