Hillsdale police have arrested a local woman for allegedly throwing a rock through a back window at the Blossom Shop in downtown Hillsdale in early August.
Mindy Flowers, 24, was charged with misdemeanor malicious destruction of property on August 25. Hillsdale Police Chief Scott Hephner said that security footage from a nearby business led them to the suspect.
“It occurred about three o’ clock in the morning, and some of what led us to her was video,” Hephner said. “It’s a misdemeanor, and it goes by the value of the damage.”
Video footage showed a Chevrolet Blazer drive through the alley and stop briefly by the Blossom Shop. Police identified the vehicle as belonging to Flowers’ partner Otis Campbell, estranged husband of Blossom Shop employee Jennifer Campbell.
According to the police report, several people vouched that Otis Campbell was at Flowers’ parents house when the incident occurred. When police interviewed Flowers, she tearfully confessed to breaking the window with a rock from her driveway because of tension between Jennifer Campbell and herself.
For her part, Jennifer Campbell thinks her husband, not Flowers, is the guilty party.
“I just wish that justice would be served,” Campbell said, “because I think that he was the one that did it.”
Campbell, who is divorcing her husband, said that the figure in the security footage is difficult to identify, but the Chevy Blazer they drive is not.
“I can tell you that I bought and purchased those vehicles for my husband, and I could name that vehicle,” Campbell said. “Somebody got out of the vehicle, which looks like a man, but honestly it’s so dark and from the way the camera shoots you really can’t see.”
Campbell also said that it was her husband, not Flowers, who had a motive to damage her workplace, and that Flowers is simply taking the fall for the crime.
“I think he was doing that to show me that he was coming to get me, because it was a bad relationship,” she said. “He had threatened a thousand times about doing different things.
“She’s in a bad situation,” Campbell said of Flowers, “I wish her the best of luck.”
