With a U.S. flag flying outside his immaculate Grenada Drive home not far from the Redding Municipal Airport, 86-year-old John Thode of Redding has felt safe and secure living there these past 25 years.
The now frail and soft-spoken Navy veteran of World War II had no idea that he would be attacked on the home front years after that war ended. The tranquillity of his home was shattered earlier this week when vandals defaced it and his property with vulgarities and hate crime language.
He says he has a hard time expressing his emotions.
“But I don’t feel the same since it’s happened,” Thode said Wednesday.
The vandals, who apparently began their handiwork on Meadow View Drive near his home, brazenly entered his backyard as he slept Sunday night.
They spray-painted a garden shed with a vulgarity and then tagged the exterior wall of a bedroom with a message demonstrating their disrespect and to show him they had been there.
It reads: “Say cheese” with a smiley face underneath it.
Investigators from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office are now on the case, and Thode is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of those responsible.
Thode, who’s being supported and comforted by family members and his church — St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Anderson — said he first became aware of the vandalism on Monday when he went out to get his mail.
The numbers on his mailbox were blacked out with spray paint.
He subsequently found the other graffiti on his property and near it.
A widower for three years, Thode says he’s irritated, as well as embarrassed, by the graffiti left behind.
“I hate to have my neighbors see my house,” he said.
Although county workers Wednesday cleaned up the graffiti on the public property near his home, Thode will have to pay for the work to remove the graffiti on his private property, which may cost at least $2,000 to $3,000.
The cost doesn’t faze him as much as the thought that he was targeted by the taggers. That has shaken him to the core.
He spent two days at a daughter’s home in Shingletown after the graffiti was discovered because he was afraid to stay home, family members say. He had a pacemaker implanted only last week.
He’s not a man who has not seen his share of danger during his lifetime.
Thode spent a good part of World War II in what were called steel coffins, facing death at nearly every turn as a submariner in the Pacific and European theaters during the war.
His submarine was attacked and almost sunk three times during the war, and he witnessed the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay on the deck of the USS Tigrone as a Petty Officer 1st Class.
His family members can’t help but to be incensed that the vandals would do this.
“He doesn’t deserve this,” said nephew Woody Hood of Shingletown, who’s also a licensed private investigator.
Still, Thode, who is deeply religious, says he doesn’t hate those who did this to him.
“No, I don’t hate them,” he said. “I feel sorry for them that they would stoop so low.”
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