When Jason Starr’s grandmother, Martha Starr, age 90, called him “the firecracker,” she wasn’t kidding around. The 44-year-old owner of Starr Portables in Millville, Pennsylvania, has proven he’s a real pit bull when it comes to chasing down vandals who come after his restrooms. And, unfortunately, that’s happened too often lately.

Starr only officially took over the three-generation family business in December 2020 when he bought out his uncle, Greg, but he’s been working there for most of his life. And until the past few years, he doesn’t recall having to deal much with equipment vandalism across his rural territory. Recently, however, graffiti and destroyed portable restrooms have become more of a problem, and Starr isn’t taking it sitting down, to say the least.

If you are inclined to think vandalism is just part of the cost of doing business and that it’s a hopeless cause to track down and punish the culprits, you might want to consider how Starr has been able to beat the odds. Over the past year, this septic sleuth has identified vandals on three occasions and made them pay for their criminal activities. And now he faces his biggest crapper caper to date: a pair of trampled toilets at a local sports field that were deemed a total loss.

The latest destruction went down this summer at Streater Fields in Bloomsburg, where Starr Portables has been placing restrooms for years without incident. The structures were pushed clean off the skids, which had been secured in the ground with half-inch rebar stakes to prevent them from blowing over in the wind. 

FIGHTING BACK

Hopping mad, Starr took to his popular Facebook page and offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the vandals. His 3,000 Facebook followers took notice, and so did area media outlets. 

His reward offer was covered in the local Press-Enterprise newspaper and then picked up by two area TV news stations. 

 “That Facebook post has had 68,000 views and 800 shares, and the next thing you know, it shows up on the news. It was crazy; it went big-time viral,” he recalled. After a few weeks, Starr upped his reward offer to $700 and was confident the vandals will eventually be caught. “It will come out with time. Down the road someone is going to spill their guts about it. I’m bound and determined and headstrong that I will find them.”

If the past is any indicator, Starr’s confidence is warranted. 

The spate of senseless sabotage started with a contract to provide 80 restrooms to two large construction sites for the same customer. Not too long ago, Starr and his crew noticed a shocking uptick in racist and other vulgar graffiti in many of the construction units. They were constantly trying to keep up removing the scrawlings, but they just kept coming back. 

One day Starr was on the job site and went to clean several restrooms. The first door he opened revealed the worker responsible for the damage. 

“I opened the door to clean the restroom and here he was writing on it. I went right to the union steward on the site and they took care of it. They had the guy cleaning [a bank of 10 restrooms] on his lunch break,” Starr said. He hasn’t seen that construction worker since, and assumes he was fired for the graffiti, which was often directed at the construction supervisor.

CAUGHT ON VIDEO

In another instance, Starr had some help identifying a group of teens who ran over a construction restroom with a pickup truck. It’s a small town, and someone sent Starr a video they received via social media site Snapchat showing the boys celebrating as they ran over the restroom. One call to his friends at the state police and he located the ringleader. 

Starr went straight to the young men and made an offer they couldn’t refuse. Give him $550 to replace the unit or face charges. A few days later the teens showed up with a stack of $1, $5 and $10 bills to pay for the damage. “I wanted to give those kids a chance; that mess-up on their record could have hurt them when they got older,” he said. Many young people deserve a second chance, he added. “I was a wild child, an adrenaline junkie, but I never damaged anyone’s property.”

Starr wasn’t so charitable when another one of his units was snatched from a road construction site by, as it turns out, a past customer who rented restrooms for outdoor parties. He offered a reward for help, and a woman called and claimed the $100 after she saw his unit in the back of a pickup truck heading down the highway. She provided the license plate number, then Starr and police found the unit in the thief’s backyard. 

“He said he was in a bar having cocktails with his buddies and they said [the restroom] was sitting on the road for free. What do you mean for free? He told me it was a joke,” Starr recalled the man’s reaction when caught. “He lied to me, and I said ‘I’m going to prove a point with you.’ If someone messes with me, I’m not going to put up with it.”

In this case, Starr pressed charges against the man. In the end, he was paid $700 in damages, got the unit back, and the man was sentenced to six months on probation and was forced to work 30 hours of community service. 

“I don’t lay down for them. I go after them guns a-blazin’,” Starr said.  

His persistence has paid off in the past, and I don’t doubt that Starr will get to the bottom of the most recent vandalism in the park. 

SHARE YOUR STORY

Starr’s success at tracking down these offenders should offer a ray of hope for the portable sanitation industry that seems to be plagued by these costly property damage complaints. I have talked to many PROs whose profit margins have been reduced by all sorts of vandalism, from graffiti to tip-overs to fires. I welcome your suggestions on ways to reduce these incidents or blunt the impact they have on your business. Please share your tips at editor@promonthly.com and I will include them in a future column.