Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Hestands Floral owner Rose Richards shows damage to a refrigerated room door Wednesday morning. Richards said she could account for five places where bullets struck the interior of the business, including two in the refirgerated room's door.
PORTALES - Rose Richards has no idea why anybody would ever fire a bullet into her Portales floral shop. But the longtime owner of Hestands Floral did learn quite a bit about the community in the aftermath.
Richards and staff closed the shop on Tuesday following the early morning vandalism, and were able to do enough cleaning to reopen the shop Wednesday while various suppliers gave estimates on items beyond Richards' ability to fix.
"We don't know if we were targeted specifically, or it's just random," said Richards, who noted other neighboring businesses didn't report damage.
The Portales Police Department reported Friday that Mauricio Jose Vidana was arrested in connection with the shooting, and faces charges of criminal damage and shooting at or from a motor vehicle.
According to a Wednesday PPD release, the department received reports of shots fired in the general area around 1:20 a.m. Tuesday, but officers were unable to locate anybody or any signs of shooting. The department responded at 8:30 a.m. to calls reporting criminal damage to a business and found approximately six holes caused by an unknown firearm.
Richards, who has owned the shop for just over 13 years, said she has only located one shell but can place at least five bullets going through the wall facing the south alley and the storefront windows. Damage was seen in display cases, a lamp, a front window, a greenhouse window, and a refrigerated section door with the bullet still lodged inside.
The shooting's early morning timeframe, Richards said, had its positives and negatives.
While Richards would naturally prefer the shooting never happened in the first place, she could take solace in the fact it happened when nobody was in the building. Based on where the bullets hit, she considered it a certainty she or another employee would have been injured in a daytime version of the shooting.
Also, in the aftermath of the shooting and a Facebook post where she announced the shop's brief closure, Richards received an outpouring of support from people willing to help clean and defray replacement costs.
"One person, for whatever reason," Richards said, "decided to shoot into the shop. Pretty much the entire community has rallied around us. You can't beat that."
