Vandals Broke Prized Window but Gave Church a Rock to Build On

Part of the Tower of Light -- the 46-year-old stained glass focal point at the front of Arcadia’s Santa Anita Church -- was shattered earlier this week, apparently the victim of vandals, a senior minister said.

“When someone can come in [and] destroy the area that others have called their spiritual home, it’s heartbreaking,” the Rev. Terry Keenan said Wednesday.

Keenan, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, said he did not consider the Monday morning incident a hate crime because there was no graffiti or attempt at wider destruction.

Instead, he said, he considered it an act of vandalism and said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if it was done by the same people who burglarized the church-sponsored school last year.

“Nobody saw anything. We have no real leads on this,” Sgt. Paul Foley of the Arcadia Police Department said Thursday.

The church will need to replace the broken portion of the window, damaged by a rock.

Keenan said the repairs could cost $5,000 to $10,000 and would be covered by the church’s $260,000 insurance policy for the entire window.

The Tower of Light, installed when the church was built in 1959, is a half-cylinder blend of autumnal colors -- gold, bronze, lighter yellow, burgundy and clear stained glass -- measuring 25 feet in diameter and about 30 feet in height.

The damaged portion could be difficult to replace because a lot of the glass -- imported from France, Germany and Italy -- is no longer available, Keenan said.

The church’s founder, Ethel Barnhart, envisioned the Tower of Light before the church was built, even though glass designers told her at first that it couldn’t be done, Keenan said. Originally affiliated with the Church of Religious Science, the church became nondenominational in the late 1960s or the ‘70s, he said.

Church officials believe the window was damaged about 4:30 a.m. Monday. That’s when a staff member was notified by the alarm company that the power to the school administration building had been shut off, disabling the alarm system. The staff member arrived at 5 a.m., Keenan said.

Keenan later found shards of broken glass inside the chapel. Arcadia police were notified about 8:30 a.m. and were investigating the matter, Foley said.

Keenan said the rock used to break the window was “bigger than a man’s head” and probably was picked up by the vandals near the church grounds.

He said he plans to use the rock in his Sunday sermon to illustrate points about anger.