Rep Grimm”Assault on Dem" on His HQ Staten Is.Windows Broken by 8th Grader
The vandal who smashed windows over the weekend at Representative Michael G. Grimm’s campaign office on Staten Island has come forward, the police said Tuesday.
He is 14 years old and confessed to a counselor at his school, where he is in the eighth grade, law enforcement officials said.
The Grimm campaign had said earlier that the vandal also broke into an office computer and erased “confidential campaign files and polling data” in a “politically motivated crime” that constituted an “assault on democracy.” But a continuing review by New York Police Department computer experts has not, so far, found that anything was erased or tampered with, a law enforcement official said.
And investigators believe that the boy did not even know that the building, on Hylan Boulevard in New Dorp, was a congressman’s office until he saw news reports.
On Tuesday, Mr. Grimm, a Republican, told The Staten Island Advance, “While we still do not know what happened to the computers, and are waiting for the N.Y.P.D. computer crimes unit to determine the nature of the tampering, it is possible that a volunteer could have inadvertently compromised the computer and failed to report it.”
The police said the boy was expected to be charged with criminal mischief.
A law enforcement official said that on Monday the investigators from the Police Department’s Computer Crimes Squad examined the computer systems in Mr. Grimm’s office and found no indications that they had been sabotaged.
On Tuesday, the investigators were in the process of conducting a more in-depth forensic examination, the official said. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said Tuesday morning that that examination had just begun and that “no determination had been made as whether there was tampering.” Mr. Browne said the time-consuming process might not be completed until Wednesday.
New York Times
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