Developer offering reward to find vandals who defaced Hollywood-style neighbourhood sign

Langford, B.C. -

A Langford developer is offering up a $2,000 reward for anyone who can provide information to RCMP that leads to the arrest of the person or people responsible for vandalizing the neighbourhood’s ode to Hollywood.

Westhills Land Corp. says its massive Westhills sign – designed to emulate the famous one in Hollywood – was defaced between July 28 and July 29.

“We always love a good prank here at Westhills, but when pranks cause a lot of damage and are financially a burden to us – it’s not a great situation,” says Rob Muller, the company's director for sales and marketing.

The letters on the hillside sign overlooking West Shore parkway were uprooted and rearranged to spell "heist."

“I enjoyed seeing the sign go up and it felt nice and it looked wonderful,” says neighbour Marilyn Holmes. “To see that it was vandalized is just part of this crazy era we live in today where things seem to be going wrong on a regular basis.”

“People seem to love to destroy stuff that’s not theirs,” says another nearby resident, Jodie McDougall.

Westhills Land Corp. is working to restore the sign. Muller says it cost $30,000 to install last spring. The damage to it is pegged at $15,000, and he believes multiple people would’ve had to be involved in the mischief.

“Each of those signs is airplane-grade aluminum. The sign letters themselves aren’t necessarily heavy, but they’re on stand-offs and they’re drilled into a concrete anchor on the hillside, so quite a significant task to remove them,” Muller adds.

West Shore RCMP says investigators have not been able to identify any suspects or witnesses, yet. In a statement, Cpl. Nancy Saggar says officers don’t endorse or facilitate rewards because the money isn’t coming from police.

“I think it’s easy for somebody to look at a prank like this and say, 'Oh it doesn’t harm anybody, there’s no damage caused by it,'” says Muller. “But we just want to get the word out that this is a very costly sign, a costly prank and we want to do everything we can to find the individuals responsible.”