A man suspected of vandalizing a building on the Mount Allison campus and trespassing in local area backyards is under arrest and awaiting a bail hearing on Friday.

Corporal Brian Villers of the Sackville RCMP says the man was located inside a vehicle Monday night and then in someone’s apartment on Tuesday, when he was arrested. He is being held until a bail hearing on Friday.

The 54-year-old man from Springhill, Nova Scotia was previously arrested in Amherst in July, when he was released on conditions. Those conditions were breached Tuesday, leading to his arrest, says Villers.

Villers says the man is also the suspect in some vandalism that took place overnight from Monday to Tuesday in the Avard Dixon Building on the Mount Allison campus.

Villers says he can’t speak to the man’s mental state, but an account of the vandalism indicates someone in mental distress or confusion.

Mount Allison professor Brad Walters says he was just leaving for work when a colleague notified him the building where he works had been vandalized overnight. When Walters arrived at the Avard Dixon, some cleanup was underway, but the remaining scene was unusual.

Items had been carefully removed from the walls on two floors, and a number of kitchen items and dishes were piled on chairs in the hallway. A number of items from the hall walls were also rolled up and stuffed into a garbage bin nearby.

“Whoever did this did so quite systematically,” says Walters, “and without overtly damaging a lot of it. So they took their time.”

Walters also says the person did not take anything of real value, at least that he was aware of on Tuesday afternoon, and there did not appear to be any malicious intent at play. The person also left behind a number of items, some with personal information which appear to belong to the man who was arrested Tuesday by the RCMP.

“There was a mishmash of things left behind, which we collected and sort of set aside and put in the bag for the police when they came,” says Walters. “And we later learned that they the person had also left a cell phone behind downstairs.”

The person also left a number of messages and notes, some “almost humorous, like, ‘Oh, time to go back upstairs. I’m hungry,’” says Walters. “And one was a bit of a mini diatribe against the Prime Minister.”

“It was all in total quite a strange matter,” says Walters.

Mount Allison spokesperson Laura Dillman said on Tuesday morning that the university was investigating the vandalism.

Walters says that after initial concerns over the strangeness of the incident, he and his colleagues are somewhat relieved that the police seem to have arrested the person involved, and that there didn’t appear to be any physical threat.

The one mystery that remains is how the individual got into the Avard Dixon Building.

“There’s some questions that need to be clarified about the securing of the building at night,” says Walters, “and why this was allowed to happen… Just the fact that they got into here, and were in here for obviously quite a bit of time, doing what they wanted, is a reason for concern, of course.”

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