Three windows replaced, cause of damage remains unknown

Three windows on the east side of the walkway connecting Oliver Hall to the School of Business building were found damaged Friday morning, but university officials and police said they don’t know exactly what caused the damage or when it occurred. VCU facilities management crews arrived early that afternoon to knock the fractured glass out of the windows and clean up the mess.

Brian Ohlinger, associate vice president for facilities management, said those windows consisted of two plates of glass with a sheet of film between them, and while the outer panes of each window had been damaged the rest remained intact.

Facilities management officials discovered two to three dime-sized holes in each plate of glass. Ohlinger speculated that a vandal with rocks or a pellet rifle could have broken the window but added that there was not enough evidence to be sure.

“Nothing was embedded in the glass,” he said.

Carlton Edwards, deputy chief of VCU police, agreed that vandals could possibly be to blame but said that police were simply considering it property damage for the time being.

“Somebody might have shot a BB,” he said, “but that’s just speculation. There’s no evidence that somebody actually broke it.”

Ohlinger said the windows will cost $5,000 to $7,000 to replace and will take two to three weeks for the glass to be specially made.

VCU police and facilities management officials began marking off the area around 1:20 p.m. with yellow tape and orange plastic cones. By 1:45 p.m. all pedestrian traffic was directed away from the scene.

At approximately 2:10 p.m. police stopped traffic on Main Street while workers laid blue tarp across the road and on cars to catch the shards that would fall from the windows. The workers then used hammers to knock out the glass from the inside of the building. By 2:25 p.m. nearly all the glass had been removed from the windows and swept off the roads. Traffic began moving through the left lane again.

Some drivers and pedestrians appeared unhappy with the situation. Janice Williams, a passenger on a Kids-N-Us Child Care Center bus, said she thought it would have been better to stop traffic at an intersection instead of on Main Street just before the skywalk.

“It would have been common sense to block the road off at a turn so people could make detours,” she said. “VCU wasn’t thinking on this one.”

Ohlinger said the windows could have been damaged Thursday night or even two months ago. Because the window blinds were shut on the inside and the glass was a dark smoky color, it would be difficult to notice the damage.

A VCU professor was sitting at a computer next to one of the shattered windows when he noticed the damaged glass. He called the Facilities Management Department around 10:30 a.m., Ohlinger said.

All three windows were part of a mathematics computer laboratory. Currently the window frames are filled with a type of wooden board.