Police Score a Suspect in Felony Game of Tag : Crime: Hunt ends in arrest of youth thought to be Kaya, whose graffiti has marred at least 45 properties.

For weeks, detectives tracked the elusive tagger known as Kaya, filling photo albums with snapshots of his distinctive scrawls on overpasses, street signs and buildings. They borrowed video cameras with infra-red scopes to aim at the teen-ager’s favorite targets, and hired a handwriting analyst to verify the graffiti was done by the same hand.

On Wednesday, the hunt ended when 10 police officers roused a sleepy 17-year-old believed to be Kaya from an afternoon nap, and arrested him on suspicion of felony vandalism.

Orange police detectives said the teen-ager has scrawled his moniker on at least 45 structures, and that he is one of the most prolific taggers in Orange County. Detective Jack Nanigian, lead investigator on the case, described the tagger “as a very, very busy young man.”

Busy indeed. The Kaya tag can be seen on a light pole outside the Federal Building in Santa Ana, and on a sign along the Costa Mesa Freeway. “Kaya” mars school walls, concrete slopes along flood channels and garage doors in at least four cities.

The teen-ager arrested Wednesday afternoon at a Santa Ana house marched, bare-chested and petulant, to a waiting police car and said officers were unfair and overzealous.

“I got nothing to say to you,” the teen, who turns 18 today, told the officers. “Why are you raiding my house like this, dragging me out and invading my privacy?”

The youth had a full-leg cast on his right leg, an injury he told police he suffered trying to hop a fence. “And how did it happen that you were doing that?” Nanigian asked him, getting no reply.

The teen-ager, whose name was withheld because he is a minor, was being held at Orange County Juvenile Hall on Wednesday.

Nanigian said he hopes the youth’s arrest will send a message to taggers, whose vandalism costs county agencies more than $4 million a year. Orange police officials, like many other agencies, say they have declared war on spray paint vandals, and the department has had an added incentive since someone tagged the City Council Chambers and a police cruiser in recent months.

Santa Ana Police Officer Mona Ruiz, a member of the arrest team, said Kaya represents a new wave of taggers.

“There aren’t as many taggers as there were, but a lot of the newer guys don’t have the same code as the originals,” Ruiz said. “They tag houses and churches. And they are more and more often violent like gang members.”

Nanigian said he began tracking Kaya in October, collecting information and photos of graffiti from the California Highway Patrol, Santa Ana police, Caltrans and other agencies that had documented his vandalism.

The detective described Kaya as a high school dropout who has little contact with his family and was difficult to track because he was on the move so much.

Kaya’s tag atop the abandoned Baxter Building in Santa Ana, in eight-foot-high letters visible from the Santa Ana Freeway, was for weeks a daily reminder to Nanigian that the tagger was always out there.

Earlier this month, Nanigian said the Kaya suspect was “arrestable,” but he said police continued logging his alleged crimes and tallying the damage. The goal, Nanigian said, was to see if the total damage exceeded $5,000, which makes graffiti vandalism a felony offense.

“We’re looking for a home run here, not just a single,” Nanigian said in an earlier interview. “We could go out and get him right now. But if you’re going to put the labor in, you might as well go for the gusto.”

Nanigian said a felony conviction can land a tagger in jail for a year or more, as opposed to a handful of days given to misdemeanor offenders.

“It’s a game to these guys, but we want to take all the fun out of that game,” he said.