The New York City Police Department has released footage of the suspect who vandalized a 10-foot tall bronze-colored bust of George Floyd located in NYC’s Union Square Park.
Surveillance footage, filmed around 10 a.m. ET on Sunday (October 3), captured a man on a skateboard crouching behind the nearby statue of late Congressman John Lewis before skating by Floyd’s statue and dumping gray paint on the bust.
The vandalism occurred two days after the memorial statues of Floyd, Lewis, and Breonna Taylor were unveiled in Union Square Park.
“It’s incredibly disappointing how the statues were defaced in such a short amount of time, and it just goes to show you how far we still have to go to reach our goal of unity,” George’s brother Terrence Floyd said Sunday in a joint statement with the nonprofit We Are Floyd Foundation, per the New York Times.
Chris Carnabuci, the artist who made the statues, also released a statement following Sunday’s vandalism, saying, “It is quite upsetting to us all.” He added. “Vandalism of any sort is not an action that is productive or meaningful. Actions like this remind us that we have a long way to go, and we will never stop fighting.”
The same Floyd memorial statue was vandalized in June while it was on display in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Less than a week after the bust’s unveiling in Brooklyn, vandals defaced it with a symbol of the far-right white supremacist group Patriot Front.
No arrests have reportedly been made in that case.