Quincy City Hall hit by burglary; nothing taken

QUINCY - Police are still searching for a suspect in a break-in into city hall.

Officials say nothing appears to have been tampered with inside the building.

A screen was torn and a potted plant knocked over in a window leading into the vital records office in the old city hall building. Birth, death and marriage certificates for the city clerk’s department are stored in that office.

Police Chief Robert Crowley said an alarm was tripped and police were on the scene within minutes of the break-in, which took place Thursday night. He said it appears the window had been left unlocked by somebody who works in the office.

Crowley said it was not clear that someone had even gotten into the building, because nothing was disturbed. A detective has taken fingerprints from the window, and police will run them through a State Police database.

City Clerk Joseph Shea said nothing appeared to be missing.

Election ballots, which had been delivered only days earlier, were locked in a safe in another room, Shea said. He said he counted all of them and all were still in their cases.

“Everything was intact,” he said. “I opened all the safes.”

Shea said that each office in city hall is locked, and that he helped unlock and check all of them to make sure nobody was in them and that nothing had been disturbed.

Several custodians were in the building at the time of the break-in, which happened early in the evening, Shea said.

Shea and Crowley said break-ins into city hall are unusual.

Two city officials pleaded guilty to a bungled burglary in 2001; personnel documents were stolen.

Authorities had believed that the chief plumbing inspector at the time, Ralph Maher, masterminded the incident to steal portions of his personnel file that were being sought by federal investigators as part of a citywide corruption probe. Daniel Keating, who was Mayor James Sheets’ executive secretary at the time, was also involved.

Asked whether he thought last week’s break-in could be politically motivated, Crowley said no.

“I don’t see anything along that line,” he said.

Neither Mayor William Phelan nor his challenger in the November election, Tom Koch, said they were concerned about the possibility of foul play, even though the incident happened only weeks before the election.

Phelan said Crowley called him after the break-in.

“He said it didn’t appear as though anything was disturbed, so it didn’t really concern me,” the mayor said.

Koch said he did not know many of the details, but from what he could tell, “it sounds like these things happen.”

Diana Schoberg may be reached at dschoberg@ledger.com.