A woman who dumped black paint on a “Black Lives Matter” mural in New York City defaced two other murals championing the political movement.
Bevelyn Beatty, 29, of Staten Island, was arrested with another woman on Saturday for dumping paint over the yellow words on Fifth Avenue outside the Trump Tower.
She was released with an order to appear on court for criminal mischief, a police spokeswoman told The Epoch Times.
Beatty posted videos to social media showing her rubbing paint on “Black Lives Matter” murals in the Harlem neighborhood in Manhattan and on a street in Brooklyn after being released.
“Y’all, we did an all-nighter,” Beatty said on Sunday. “Let me tell you something, yesterday was epic.”
The woman was wearing a “Jesus Matters” T-shirt each time she struck at a mural. She’s is affiliated with At the Well Ministries, a Christian organization.
Beatty said she was “being an American” when she defaced the murals. “But more than that, I was being a Christian. This is what Christians do, we turn tables. We destroy the works of the devil,” she added.
The video showing Beatty and two others bringing paint from the back of a minivan and using a roller to spread it across the words “Black Lives Matter” in Brooklyn was approximately seven minutes and 30 seconds long. Several minutes after beginning their vandalism, a group approached them and urged them to stop and leave.
“You doin' the wrong thing,” one man said. Another added: “This is for all black lives.”
In Harlem, the group used two vehicles. As drivers slowly piloted them over the painted words, people perched in the back dumped paint on the mural.
“This is for Jesus, ya'll,” one man says during the so-called drive-by painting.
At least five people, including Beatty, have been arrested for defacing the mural in midtown.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, ordered the murals painted across the city and helped create the first on earlier this month.
Black Lives Matter is a movement that started in 2013 after George Zimmerman, a Hispanic man, was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, in Florida.
Leaders say the group’s mission “is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
Two of the three founders of the movement describe themselves as Marxists, or adherents to extreme philosophical ideas from communism founder Karl Marx.
The group is also focused on working “to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk” and disrupting “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement,” according to the Black Lives Matter Global Network’s website.
