Updated, 3:53 p.m. | The vandal who smashed windows at Representative Michael G. Grimm's Staten Island campaign office over the weekend has come forward, the police said.
He is 14 years old and confessed to a counselor at his school, where he is in the eighth grade, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Though the Grimm campaign has said that vandals also broke into a computer in the office and erased “confidential campaign files and polling data†in a “politically motivated crime†that constituted an “assault on democracy,†police computer experts have not found that anything had been erased or tampered with, a law enforcement official said.
And investigators believe that the boy did not even know that the building, on Hylan Boulevard in New Dorp, was a congressman's office until he saw news reports.
On Tuesday, Mr. Grimm told The Staten Island Advance, “While we still do not know what happened to the computers, and are waiting for the N.Y.P.D. computer crimes unit to determine the nature of the tampering, it is possible that a volunteer could have inadvertently compromised the computer and failed to report it.â€
The police said the boy was expected to be charged with criminal mischief.
