Man Who Plastered Hundreds of Chief Wahoo Stickers Around Aurora Charged With Criminal Mischief

One of hundreds of Chief Wahoo stickers stuck around Aurora Credit: Aurora Police Department

Over the past year, hundreds of Chief Wahoo stickers have popped up around Aurora, on signs and businesses around town, on public and private property. The Chief Wahoo bandit was on the loose. And police were on the case

After receiving complaints and investigating, authorities have now identified a suspect, a 66-year-old Aurora resident who on Wednesday was charged with two counts of criminal mischief, a third-degree misdemeanor, according to Portage County Clerk of Court records.

“[The suspect] admitted to being one of two individuals involved with the placement of these stickers,” reads an Aurora police report. “A second subject was contacted and denied any involvement.”

Officials intend to use court proceedings to force the man to clean up the mess, scraping the offending Wahoos from city property and local restaurants and stores including Starbucks and Santa Maria’s Hair Design.

While rare, such cases aren’t unheard of, and usually involve racist, lewd, anti-semitic or otherwise offensive imagery plastered en masse and over prolonged periods of time. We’re not talking about your band stickers stuck on bar bathrooms here. In this case, not only would some view Chief Wahoo as a racist red Sambo consigned to the dustbin of history, but it appears the stickers are primarily just plain annoying to deal with.

“This is something that can’t just be taken off easily with a razor blade. It takes a solvent, an acid or something like that and a razor blade to get it off,” one complainant told Fox 8. “It’s quite a bit of work.”

Whether misguided in efforts to support the local baseball team, forever indignant over having to call that baseball team by a different name, or wrongly inspired after reading Now Is Not the Time to Panic, it seems the payoff is not going to be worth it.

“If the reason you wake up and the reason you get out and do what you do is because of a baseball team changing their logo,” the same complainant told Fox 8, “I’m sorry, you’ve got to find better things to do.”

(Scene is not identifying the suspect because this all feels like a comically silly use of resources.)