Putting to rest the notion that last week’s attempted arson of a fast-food restaurant in Chico, California, might have been an isolated incident, animal-rights criminals struck another McDonald’s yesterday in the same town.
The Chico Enterprise-Record reports that McDonald’s employees called the Sheriff’s Office at 7:15 in the morning after they “found a small fire had been set in an attempt to burn down the concrete-block building.”
As with last week’s attack, the arsonist(s) left behind their calling card: the spray-painted letters “A-L-F” (for “Animal Liberation Front”) — the same graffiti found at the other Chico McDonald’s (and carved, incidentally, into a promotional object d’art from PETA last year).
Unlike the earlier arson attempt, this one appears to have been a simple fire, set without the benefit of plastic milk jugs filled with flammable liquids (what we’re now calling the “Rod Coronado design”).
The Enterprise-Record adds one interesting piece of information about last week’s arson, writing that the two firebombs “had been lighted but failed to ignite.” It would be fair to conclude, then, that the activists responsible for that attack intended to burn their target to the ground, rather than just putting unlit incendiary devices in place for shock value.
Sheriff’s Sergeant Tony Borgman told KCRC-TV News last night that it is “too early to say it is the same people, but they have the same political beliefs.”
