Vietnam War Memorial In Venice Vandalized Again

VENICE (CBSLA.com) – A memorial in Venice for troops who went missing in action during the Vietnam War has been vandalized for the second time in the past year.

Resident Stewart Oscars was riding his bike on Pacific Avenue near Sunset Court in Venice recently when he noticed the Vietnam War Memorial had been vandalized.

"There's just no respect for what this is," Oscars told CBS2 Tuesday. "I'm just mad and sad."

It was first vandalized on Memorial Day weekend of 2016. In January, 24-year-old Angel Castro was sentenced to four years in state prison after pleading no contest to charges of vandalism and robbery in connection with the incident, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The coverage moved dozens of volunteers to come together clean off the graffiti. However, in the cleaning process, dozens of the 2,237 names were wiped away. The Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), tracked the full list of names that were on the wall from the estate of the original artist, Patrick Stewart.

"This was a great investigative piece of our work," SPARC Founder Judy Baca said.

SPARC will begin restoring the memorial next week. Then crews will add an invisible coating to protect it from any future graffiti. The coating will allow the graffiti to be washed off.

"It's very light water spray," Baca said. "And the graffiti will not attach to the mural shield that we've put on it."

The mural was painted in the early 1990s by Stewart and bears the names of soldiers counted as prisoners of war or missing in action in Vietnam. There was no word on whether authorities had identified any tagging suspects in the most recent vandalism.