Police officers from Ingleside Station arrested the alleged serial Mission Street mural vandal Tuesday night. She had been filmed by bystanders on Sunday while she defaced a mural on Mission Street by late muralist Mario Cid Gonzalez.
Witnesses said they observed a woman matching the suspect’s description defacing that mural months prior as well. Tuesday’s arrest of 33-year-old Ana Da Costa Pereira came after the defacement of more murals that night, including one on the side of the Excelsior District’s Central Drug Store at Mission and Santa Rosa streets.
Da Costa Pereira was booked into the San Francisco County jail Tuesday night at 9:22 p.m. for vandalism causing more than $400 in damage, and two counts of possession of graffiti instruments.
Police said that Da Costa Pereira is responsible for multiple incidents of mural vandalism up and down Mission Street.
An email police sent to Mission Local noted that officers visited the defaced Mission Street mural that was the subject of a Mission Local article Tuesday: “Through the course of investigation, the officers were able to identify the suspect, who they discovered was arrested by SFPD Officers from Ingleside Station.”
Officers from Mission Station added felony and misdemeanor charges while Da Costa Pereira was in custody at the county jail.
Onlookers who filmed the defacement of the Mission Street mural on Sunday allege that Da Costa Pereira also vandalized it earlier this year.
One witness, Antonio Barrera, said that when he called police months ago to report that incident, he was told “that the police could only do something if a unit happened to be driving by while a person was committing the crime.”
This discouraged him from making a report, and he did not call police after filming the mural’s Sunday defacement.
Jim Coursey, a resident in the Excelsior, was one of the people who claims to have witnessed Da Costa Pereira defacing the Central Drug mural on the night of Dec. 17.
Coursey said he was on his way to pick up food from Familiar, a Salvadoran restaurant across Mission from the pharmacy, around 7:20 p.m. when he saw Da Costa Pereira painting on the mural with a roller brush.
At first, Coursey thought that she was an artist making a fix to her work, but then noticed that Da Costa Pereira was not painting “particularly well,” and the “fix” looked “a bit haphazard.” After he picked up dinner and was on his way back, Coursey realized that Da Costa Pereira was simply painting over the original art.
“I asked her what she was doing, and she didn’t respond,” Coursey recalled. “And she just started packing up.” Coursey said he then “shooed her away” and watched her walking north along Mission Street.
Coursey recalled following her for a block, until Da Costa Pereira began setting up again at Francis and Mission streets, ready to paint, when Coursey shooed her away again. “She was sort of retreating, staring at me,” Coursey said. “She never spoke the entire time.”
“I was upset,” said Jerry Tonelli, the 70-year-old owner and pharmacist at the century-old Central Drug Store. Tonelli said police officers came into the store this morning and informed him that they’d arrested the suspect.
But for Tonelli, that can’t change the fact that the mural has already been defaced.
The colorful mural, named “The San Francisco You Should Know” and created by mural art center Precita Eyes artists Jason Gilmore and Cory Calandra-Devereaux, has been on the wall outside of Central Drug Store since 2009. It quietly tells the history of the Excelsior District, with landmarks such as the old streetcar that used to carry workers and families in the neighborhood, a portrait of Jerry Garcia playing the guitar and singing, the original Corpus Christi Church, and Balboa High School.
But now, a big part of the mural has been covered in white and dark brown paint.
“The wall used to be graffitied a lot until the mural was put up. We were one of the first businesses that put a mural up,” Tonelli recalled, while holding the original sketch of the mural in both of his hands. To this day, he still keeps the long, rolled-up and wrinkly sketch in the back of the store. “This mural is part of the Excelsior history.”
Make sure she stays in jail until after Christmas..and make sure to give her a brush to..clean the toilet.Good ridance..
” the police could only do something if a unit happened to be driving by while a person was committing the crime.”
Which is exactly why citizens need to step up and make an arrest.
Really sorry she did so much damage. But glad she has been caught. We have been long time customers of Central Drug. Jerry and his team are wonderful. One of the last independent pharmacies in town and they provide great service. Just a little plug! As to comments about having her fix the damage. I wouldn’t trust her with a paintbrush. But she can sure pay for time and materials for fixing the damage
Grafiiti is vandalism. It is a crime.
If Over 400 dollars of damage , then can be a felony.
This city is overrun by idiots destroying defacing and ruining public and private property .
Arrest them and throw away the key.
Persons who tag or spray graffiti are ill.
The babysitting needs to stop.
They have demonstrated they cannot live freely in society.
Sick of these go for nothing selfish idiots .
Arrest them and make them clean up the mess.
Zero tolerance for those that think they are entitled and need to spray their crap everywhere .
Get a life .
Call Preservation Arts in Oakland. They’ll have those murals back to their original glory in no time!
To Tone Dawg: where do you live again? i think your car and the place you live need a new coat of paint..no worry, it won’t be graffiti, that you seem to love, i will definitely be art, with nice structured letters…again where do you live? right, like most graffiti dudes, a coward who goes out at 2am ; give him a few years, when he moves to the suburbs, because Tone Dawg will move to the burbs, he will be calling the police if a kid skateboard in front of his house or tag his wall…typical.
I love graffiti but this isn’t even graffiti. No letters structure or characters. This is wack and makes writers that are generally chill people look bad. At 33 that shit screams mental illness to me
There’s defacement, there’s tagging, there’s graffiti and there’s unauthorized public art in violation of law. Those are 4 different things in my SF experience. For example, Banksy paints a blank wall and makes it a million dollar piece that literally gets cut out of the building to preserve it, authorized or not, and nobody seems to mind that much. Most of the stuff is tagging, squiggly name writing for ego purposes. This is obviously defacement for defacement’s sake though. That’s the worst of the 4.
Who has the idiot’s dog?
Make the idiot financially responsible for the cost to restore the murals.
Just make her repaint them all — on her time, with resources she’s purchased — until they are like new. And then ruin them and have her do it again. Maybe then she’ll have an appreciation for the damage she’s caused.
Can’t wait to hear what sob story the public defender comes up with about how Da Costa Pereira is somehow the real victim.
Right? I wonder what her “excuse” will be?
Yeah – a sob story will be coming up soon.
Does anyone know what they did with her dog? The dog looked old.
It will be hard to top what the public defender said about Thea Hopkins, at long last being charged for killing one Asian elder and maiming another:
“While we understand that the circumstances of these recent allegations are upsetting, it is disheartening to hear false assumptions being made against Ms. Hopkins, who is also a vulnerable person in the community.”
That is DEFINITELY not tagging – please don’t insult the tagging community by calling what she did art. That’s like literally pissing on someone’s creation and then having the gall to call it “art”
“…tagging community…”
Please excuse yourself from the conversation. The adults are talking.
She’s a tagger. This a well known occurrence in the graffiti tagger world and also well known to morality. There were legitimate next door responses when they thought the tagger was a karen. Public Art is finite. Most artist believe that and also embrace free walls.
She’s not a tagger – she’s a vandal. Taggers are bad – vandals are worse.
Taggers and vandals are the same thing
Taggers write their names. She was just crossing out existing stuff. That’s the distinction.
Agreed. Taggers write their names for notoriety. This was defacement for not even that little of a reason.