Table of Contents
Get our free local reporting delivered straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam — just clear, independent coverage of Marblehead. Sign up for our once-a-week newsletter.
A woman who moved into an apartment at 17 Creesy St. this summer found a racial slur scratched into the wall a few feet from her door.
Her family photographed it, then called the building’s management company. The graffiti, they were told, had apparently been there since June — before she signed a lease.
Nobody has said who scratched it. Nobody has said why it stayed.
Her daughter, Loleta Collins, contacted Marblehead resident Donna Cotterell, president of the Marblehead Racial Justice Team, on Aug. 8 and sent along the photograph her aunt had taken. Collins’ sister planned to file a police report.
“This was upsetting, to say the least,” Collins wrote.
Cotterell passed the photograph to the press the same afternoon. Her concern was less about the vandal than about the weeks that followed — a slur in a shared hallway, in plain view of anyone walking to their door, until a new tenant moved in and said something.
“Regardless of who wrote it or when, this is deeply disturbing and unacceptable,” she wrote in a message.
“If we see something, say something,” Cotterell told the Independent. “The longer it’s up there, people think it’s acceptable.”
She said the delay was what bothered her most.
“It was frustrating because it feels like no one was doing anything,” Cotterell said.
The management company removed it after the family reported it. The word had been cut into the paint hard enough to reach the drywall.
