Burlington City Police will not file criminal charges against the 37-year-old Langhorne, Pa. resident who left a strange painted statue of what appears to be a woman wearing a burka and holding a machine gun outside a gas station.
“It was more of a bad decision or a prank on his part,” said Sgt. John Fine of the Burlington City Police Department on Monday evening. “There appears to be no criminal liability associated with this case, so at this point we’re going to administratively close the case.”
According to Fine, the individual who left the three-foot-tall statue in the bushes outside a Gulf gas station at Route 130 South and High Street, went to police Monday to claim responsibility for placing the statue there.
That individual said he found the statue in the woods and left it outside the gas station randomly — and was not targeting the gas station owners, Fine said.
Burlington City police discovered the statue after video of it was posted on social media and viewed more than 15,000 times.
On Saturday they pulled it from the bushes and showed it to the gas station’s employees, who “[were] appalled by what they observed,” according to police.
Burkas are part of traditional Muslim garb.
However, an employee at the Gulf gas station said the owner is not Muslim — he is a Hindu man from India.
Regardless, the statue was not placed at the gas station as part of a bias crime, as some had suspected, according to Fine.
The individual will not be identified by police as he is not charged with a crime.
