THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 4, 1994 TAG: 9408030095
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE KNEPLER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
CHARLES SOWELL leaves a distinctive mark amid the graffiti-strewn buildings near Old Dominion University.
A blank wall.
It's a fitting signature for the man that ODU's security force jokingly calls ``The Phantom.''
With roller brush in hand, Sowell follows where graffiti vandals have tread.
With little effort, he conceals the obscenities, signatures, gang messages and pretenses at art.
The paint Sowell uses doesn't always match the color of the walls. But that's all right, he says, as long as the graffiti doesn't show through.
This summer, mostly on Saturday mornings, Sowell has covered up graffiti on more than 10 privately owned buildings.
``I don't care how many hours I have to put in,'' he said. ``It's not a mission, just something that has to get done.''
No one asked him to do it, and property owners haven't thanked Sowell for his volunteer labor.
Yet, Sowell hasn't sought their permission, and he believes many owners don't even know that their buildings have been vandalized - or cleaned up.
``I look at this as a quality of life issue,'' explained Sowell, 26, who lives in nearby Highland Park and is a senior international studies major at ODU. ``It's hard to have pride in your neighborhood when you see this stuff around.''
He's also afraid that if graffiti is not removed, it will encourage more vandalism. That fosters the perception that the ODU area is crime-ridden, Sowell said.
``It's just like why we worry about couches sitting on a sidewalk for a month. If you don't take them seriously, little problems build up very quickly,'' he said. ``If a criminal sees all this, he thinks that the community just doesn't care, and he thinks, `I can do my dealings here. Nobody cares.' ''
Sowell gave himself the unpaid job of painting over neighborhood graffiti after trying to organize a program with business sponsorship last October.
The idea was for Norfolk's Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court to assign the work to juvenile offenders as community service. There also would have been volunteers from the military, said Sowell, who served four years in the Navy and is a petty officer second class in the ILLUSTRATION: Photos by C. TODD SPENCER
Charles Sowell: ``The Phantom'' of graffiti removal.
Charles Sowell paints over graffiti behind the Kings Head Inn.
by CNB