Prison Time for the Austin Tire Slasher

A neighborhood criminal's years-long campaign of highly specialized and geographically-focused crimes has come to an end. The man suspected to be behind many hundreds of tire slashings in Austin, Texas over the past two decades has been caught and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Tommy Joe Kelley was given the maximum sentence this week for one count of unlawful use of a criminal instrument, as the Austin American-Statesman reports. Four additional indictments are pending, but the story, it turns out, is much larger than that.

The tire slashings have been an amazingly long-running phenomenon in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin, with flat tires being reported for at least the past 16 years. KXAN noted 15 slashings in one week of April, 2010, and referred to the slasher as "the neighborhood’s biggest menace," attacking tires at random.