McNairy Central's field vandalized for second straight year

Jackson Sun

"L-TOWN" can be seen spray painted on the football field after more than 100 volunteers assisted in painting over vandalism spray painted on facilities and buildings around the football field at McNairy Central High School in Selmer, Tenn., on Sunday, Sept. 30, 2018.

SELMER — For the second straight year, McNairy Central High School's football field was vandalized sometime between 11 p.m. Friday night and early Saturday morning.

Following the Bobcats' win over South Gibson Friday night, school officials woke up on Saturday morning to find vulgar language and offensive images spray-painted throughout the stadium. Lexington was spelled out by one of the bathroom entrances and "L-Town" was painted on the north end zone. It is unknown if anyone from Lexington was involved in the situation.

Similar to what happened last year, the name of a traditional rival school not on McNairy Central’s schedule was spray-painted somewhere inside the stadium. "Go A-ville" and other phrases were painted on the field and scoreboard last October. Three McNairy Central students and three former students were arrested and charged in connection with last year’s vandalism.

More than 100 people gathered to clean up the stadium in a community-wide effort on Sunday. Students and faculty members started the cleanup around 1 p.m. Sunday afternoon and finished just a few hours later. Parts of the stadium, like the restrooms and a few of the poles, were repainted completely while many of the sponsorship signs were scrubbed clean.

"It made a huge, huge difference to have everyone out here, and it was just incredible," McNairy Central Principal Jerry Pyron said. "We put a notice out on Facebook and sent a text message before church saying that we'd be out here at 1. We ended up getting a huge crowd out here and I'd say that we got more people out here than some people bring to football games from out of town."

With this happening in consecutive years, additional security measures will be taken to prevent something like this from happening again, but Pyron did not specify what those measures would be. He did say that whatever those measures are, they would be in place very soon.

This investigation is ongoing and this story will be updated as more information becomes available.

Reach Joe Spears at jspears2@gannett.com or 731-343-4923. Follow him on Twitter @joe_spears7.