The City of Dawsonville reported that the hand sanitizer from the two stations at the Dawsonville Farmer’s Market had been stolen, most likely sometime on Thursday night. 

City Manager Bob Bolz said that the sanitizer was discovered missing at about 10:30 a.m. on Friday morning. 

“We noticed they were missing and found one of them that somebody had taken off and put in one of our trash cans,” Bolz said. “And the other one they just took so it’s still missing.” 

The farmer’s market pavilion has security cameras installed, so the incident was caught on video and has been turned over to the Dawson County Sheriff’s Office. 

“We’ve got cameras everywhere now, so the sheriff’s office has already come and filed a report and gotten pictures made from the video tape,” Bolz said. “So they’re investigating it and we’ll just go from there.” 

According to Bolz, what most likely happened is a group of older teenagers or younger adults were playing a prank by removing the sanitizer. 

“I know it was probably kids playing a joke, but still we’ve got some serious times going on right now so we need to all help each other be safe,” Bolz said. “I was a kid once too and we all do stuff that’s not real smart, but we’re just trying to get everyone to all work together especially with this pandemic going on.”

Since the park and farmer’s market pavilion have opened beside the Dawsonville City Hall a few weeks ago, there has been one other small act of vandalism at the playground

“So far we’ve had one act of minor vandalism on the new playground that we’re investigating as well, where somebody scratched a nasty word on a piece of playground equipment for handicapped children,” Bolz said. “We’re lucky we’ve got a lot of good people in our community so this kind of stuff doesn’t happen too often, so we’re trying to just protect everybody and keep it nice so everyone can enjoy it.”

Cameras have been installed at both the farmer’s market pavilion and the Main Street Park playground to help prevent further incidents from happening in the future.

“I don’t think the sanitizer being stolen was anything malicious, it was probably just kids being kids and not thinking things all the way through,” Bolz said. “But we’ve been open a couple months and we’re just trying to take care of our younger citizens or folks with special needs, so just work with us.”