A man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) on Wednesday night and smashed over US$5 million worth of precious artifacts and art. Why did he do it? He says he was mad at his girlfriend.
Security video from the museum showed Brian Hernandez, 21, using a metal chair to break in through the front entrance around 9:40 p.m. Once inside, he walked from room to room and began his destructive rampage.
The two most valuable pieces of art that Hernandez destroyed were a sixth-century Greek amphora and a pot that dates back to 450 B.C., around the time of the Peloponnesian War.
According to police documents, Hernandez punched the case in which they were displayed multiple times before grabbing a metal stool and shattering the glass and two ancient artifacts within. The amphora and pot were valued at $5 million combined.
Hernandez also destroyed an ancient Greek kylix, a standard vessel for drinking wine, that dates back to 550 B.C. The outside of the kylix depicts Hercules slaying the Nemean lion, one of his famous mythological labours. The artifact is valued at around $100,000.
“The items inside of the display cases that were destroyed are rare ancient artifacts that are extremely precious and one of a kind,” Hernandez’s arrest sheet reads.
But it wasn’t just ancient art that he destroyed — Hernandez continued through the museum and destroyed a bottle in the shape of a “Batah Kuhuh Alligator Gar Fish,” which was completed in 2018 by artist Chase Kahwinhut Earles, a member of the Caddo Nation.
The piece is valued at $10,000 and Hernandez used a hand sanitizer stand to shatter its display case before picking up the statue and smashing it on the ground.
Earles told the DMA in an interview when it acquired his piece that he dug the clay for the statue himself from the Red River, collected and crushed mussel shells into the clay to strengthen the material, and used a traditional pit-firing method to fire the pottery. This is the ancestral way of making pottery in the Caddo nation.
Apart from these precious pieces of art, Hernandez was captured on video breaking a laptop, a phone, a monitor, two display signs and four plexiglass display cases, according to Dallas police.
Security guards from the DMA eventually found Hernandez and told him to sit on a bench while they called police.
Hernandez told a guard that he “got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property,” according to his arrest sheet.
Police took him into custody and Hernandez confessed to the destruction during an interview with a detective. He has been charged with criminal mischief of more than or equal to $300,000, which is punishable by five years to life in prison. His bail was set at $100,000 and he has been booked into Dallas County Jail.
Apart from stools and hand sanitizer stands, the museum said Hernandez was not armed during his tirade.
Museum director Agustín Arteaga told Fox 7 that the alleged “girl” Hernandez was angry with is not an employee of the museum.
“We don’t have any connection that we know of, for that person, related to the DMA,” Arteaga said.
Kenneth Bennett, the museum’s director of security and operations, estimated that Hernandez caused approximately $5.2 million in damage, pending a final assessment by the museum’s curator and insurance firm.
“This was an isolated incident perpetrated by one individual acting alone, whose intent was not theft of art or any objects on view at the Museum,” the museum said in a written statement. “However, some works of art were damaged, and we are still in the process of assessing the extent of the damages.
“While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed.”
The DMA has remained open despite the attack, but certain parts of the museum are closed due to the damage.
Arteaga said this is the first time the DMA has faced any real damage.
“This is something that we’ve seen recently on a different level, you know, the Mona Lisa being attacked at the Louvre. But we have a marvellous record of 120 years when we never suffer any kind of situation like this,” he said.
Just three days before Hernandez’s rampage, a man disguised as an elderly woman threw a cake at the Mona Lisa in an act of protest against climate change.
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