St. Pete restaurants on Central Avenue faced with damages from vandalism

Vandals damage resturant patio furniture

FOX 13's Kailey Tracy reports on two nearby St. Pete restaurants being vandalized early in the morning.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - It’s a popular lunchtime spot in downtown St. Pete, but the general manager of Poppo’s Taquería on Central Avenue, said someone didn’t seem to be a fan early on Nov. 10th.

"He just saw it stop, flipped it over, and then casually walked away," Kyle Frantz, the general manager of Poppo’s Taquería, said. "So, that just tells me he's just looking to destroy something for fun."

Camera footage of the vandal flipping the table outside Poppos Taqueria in St. Pete.

Frantz said his staff walked in to find one of their umbrellas broken and a table damaged. Surveillance video shows a man flipping the table early in the morning, crushing the umbrella on the table.

"It's just an additional cost. It's a little bit more aggravation. And, you know, right now, when you're trying to get things back on track [from the storms]," Frantz said. "It's just one more thing you've got to deal with, and as a small business, every dollar counts."

Around the same time, on Nov. 10, the co-owner of COPA, who was a few doors down, said their cameras captured a man flipping chairs and tables outside their restaurant. The man in their surveillance video, co-owner Maxim Thuriere said, looks like the person in Poppo’s video.

"Just being able to survive throughout the storms was already a blessing enough and to kind of navigate through the disturbances of being closed for almost two weeks," Thuriere said. "To just have to deal with the kind of vandalism on top of that is just not something that we anticipated or are used to dealing with in St. Pete."

Thuriere said this is the second time in about a month this has happened at COPA. In October, he said their cameras captured a group knocking over chairs and tables. The two incidents cost COPA about $1,000 in damage.

Footage of vandal outside Copa Restaurant in St. Pete.

"I would just like to prevent this from happening again in the future, and if we can help stop this happening to other businesses too, then that would basically be our main goal," Thuriere said. "If it means having more patrol cars at night or just having better practices to secure furniture outside, just so that other businesses wouldn't have to deal with this, with what we're going through right now."

"It would be more ideal if the neighborhood especially kind of came together collectively, and we all figured out a way to handle this, not only for the individuals that were affected but for anyone that may be in the future," Frantz said.

Frantz said he talked to the head of the Edge District about working with the St. Petersburg Police Department on the issue. Thuriere said he was filing a police report on Nov. 19.

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