Danielle McGee, 46, was arrested on March 17 for damaging more than 40 parked cars, many owned by city workers.
According to KRQE, seven of the damaged cars were at the parking lot on Fourth Street and Marquette Avenue. As many as 34 were damaged inside the parking garage under Civic Plaza where the city council and mayor’s office staff park for work.
Erik Strobert told KRQE he saw McGee in the civic plaza parking garage when she approached him with a baseball bat in hand while he was installing glass break sensors. Strobert said the woman asked him how much his car was worth and then chased him swinging the bat after he got him his car to leave.
“I was completely caught off guard and I didn’t really understand what was going on until she directly threatened me,” Strobert told KRQE. “Then, at that point, I was quite startled. My first reaction was to get away from the situation.”
Strobert’s car wasn’t the only one to be the target of McGee’s uncontrolled fury. Photographs obtained by KRQE show a Porsche with the back windshield and passenger side windows smashed in, and a Ferrari whose front windshield was damaged. McGee is charged with felony criminal damage. Albuquerque police said McGee is not a city employee and offered no motive for the random vandalism.
Strobert said the technology used for the glass break sensors he was installing when approached by McGee would have sounded an alarm and prevented much of the vandalism.
“It’s quite ironic,” he said. “I think it’s kind of a tale of why the city is investing in technology like this because these systems come online next week. If she would have waited one week to do this, we would have caught her before she hit 40 cars.”