“It’s a lot of damage” multiple vehicles keyed in two incidents at local dealership

A pair of incidents involving vandalism of multiple vehicles has the Wood Wheaton dealerships feeling frustrated.

“It was actually about four months ago, I think we had 11 vehicles keyed, mostly on one side,” said Director of Sales at Wood Wheaton GM and Honda Don Willimont.

“We have some cameras on the lot, but there was nothing conclusive in an image of who, only when those happened.”

Willimont said they just got the last of the vehicles repaired, after four months of work to get through those.

“On the long weekend, we believe on the Sunday night, they keyed 23 vehicles, this time doing most of them on both sides, the last time it was only one side of each vehicle, this time it was mostly both sides of each vehicle, right from the headlights on each side all the way through both doors and the sides of the vehicle to the back and the taillights,” Willimont said.

“It’s a lot of damage and it also means the vehicle can’t be for sale until they complete the repair.”

In addition to the cost of the repairs themselves, Willimont said they’ll have to reduce the selling price of the vehicles because of the damage declaration as well.

“It puts extra stress on us and extra cost because we have to elevate security,” he added.

“We’ve had to go to a full time security company overnight, so now we’re paying for someone to be here all the time, in the evening, so that has a cost. There’ll be the loss of revenue, some of these vehicles, people might have been looking at, now they’re not able to make a car deal, so maybe for us, maybe we lose those customers in the marketplace right now, and then ultimately we’ll end up losing some profit. We are a business and it’s a for-profit business, so at some point, these vehicles will sell, but they’re going to be sold at a significant discount to compensate for the damage they’ve had.”

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Willimont said with the police, “there’s not a lot they can do.”

“I mean, if you have a fuzzy image of somebody with a hoody and a hat in the dark, you’re not going to go arrest everybody that’s wearing a black hoody and a ball cap.”

Willimont said they feel frustrated it’s happened to them twice.

“We’re not the only dealers that have experienced some level of vandalism over the last year and a bit,” he said.

“For us right now, it’s just one more thing that you got to work your way through, we will continue to be in the business of selling cars and doing what we do, but it’s just a little extra aggravation to make our day more interesting.”