USED DIAMOND ON
THE STORE WINDOWS.
PLATE GLASS CUT FOR BLOCKS
ON MAIN STREET.
J. E. Stivers Arrested on Charge of
Damaging Property from Fifth
to Thirteenth Street --
Denies He Is Vandal.
All records in plate glass window cutting were broken last night by J. E. Stivers, a candymaker for the Loose-Wiles Cracker and Candy Company. In years past the record in Kansas City has been a few straggling windows, entailing a cost of from $300 to $400, but Stivers's cutting began at Thirteenth street and Grand avenue and he carried the line of march to Main street and down that street to Fifth, where he was arrested. In all, Stivers damaged sixty-three plate glass windows. If the glass has to be replaced, the total cost would not fall short of $5,000, it is estimated. Most of the places which suffered most carry plate glass insurance.
Edward Clark, recently appointed a Gamewell operator at the Walnut street police station, saw Stivers when he made his first cut on a plate glass window at the Ayres Clothing Company, 1309 Grand avenue. He followed him to Main street, along Thirteenth and down Main to Fifth, seeing him use a 1/4 karat diamond ring on all of the most valuable windows along Main street. It did not occur to Clark to make an arrest. The arrest took place while Stivers was making a final slash at a large window of the Hub Clothing Company at Fifth and Main streets. Herman Hartman, a police officer, chanced to be passing and arrested the culprit.
After leaving Thirteenth and Grand, Stivers made his way to Main street, where he wrote his initials on a glazed monument of the M. H. Rice Monument Company at that point. It was shortly after 9 p. m. when he reached Jones' Dry Goods Company's store and many persons were on the street so he succeeded in cutting but seven of the valuable windows. Some of them are cut so deeply that a tap would knock out part of the glass.
Stivers' route from here was made by jumps, he evidently passing some places on account of the night crowds. He missed most of the stores in the block between Eleventh and Twelfth streets on Main. Altogether, he damaged the windows of more than thirty clothiers, milliners, saloons, flower shops, fortune tellers and other retailers and unoccupied buildings.
When Stilvers began by the Jones Dry Goods Company, when his diamond was in good working order, he appears to have done the greatest damage.
When seen in the holdover after his arrest, Stivers was awakened from a stupor. He told who he was and said he had been working for the Loose-Wiles company for twenty years. He is now 22 years old.
"If any of those windows are damaged I did not do it," he said.
