O’Fallon, Illinois home vandalized and pool filled with motor oil, tens of thousands of dollars in damages

By Shoshana Stahl

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    O’FALLON, Illinois (KMOV) — An O’Fallon, Illinois family woke up early Sunday morning after bricks were thrown in their windows.

Suzanne Gibson says the sound of shattering glass has been living and replaying in her family’s minds since it happened Monday morning around 4:30.

“I’ll never forget the sound of the smashing glass and brick,” Gibson says. “It sounded like a gunshot. We knew instantly someone was either trying to come in the house or the front window.”

Gibson says the scariest part is that one of the rooms hit used to be her 13-year-old son’s.

“Those are the kinds of thoughts and moments that bring me to tears,” Gibson says. “Two weeks ago that cinder sized brick would have landed on his bed. The what if of that or did this person know that’s where his room was.”

However, it’s not just damage to the front of the house.

Someone used gallons of motor oil to cover furniture, concrete and fill up parts of the Gibson’s pool.

All that damage is adding up to a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars.

“Because typically if anything’s in our pool that we don’t want, we can backwash it and flush the water right out,” Gibson says. “We cannot flush used engine oil into the wooded property so we’ve been on the phone with the environmental protection agency in Illinois, the St. Clair County EPA.”

A pool company pumped out the oil, but now they have to replace all of the concrete around it.

O’Fallon, Illinois police say the suspects they’re looking for are in their mid to late teens.

Lieutenant Patrick Feldhake says video shows them riding away from the house on a motorized bike or scooter. The motorized bike/scooter does not have a working taillight.

Police are asking people in nearby neighborhoods, like Windsor Creek, Savannah Hills, August Greens and Far Oaks to check their cameras to help catch the people who did this.

“We can’t figure out the correlation of why these people were targeted,” Lt. Feldhake says. “It does seem that they were specifically targeted.”

Gibson says the teens were in and out of her backyard in under five minutes.

She’s asking them to come forward.

“Knowing who will give our kids peace of mind and they’re not crying at night when they’re trying to fall asleep,” Gibson says.

The Gibsons did have some security cameras but have invested in even more.

With just how much the damage is going to cost, the suspects could face felony charges.

Anyone with more information is being asked to call the O’Fallon, Illinois Police Department.

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