Leigh Tauss, an editor at the North Carolina alt-weekly INDY Week, was alone in the paper’s Raleigh office on the night of May 30 when the first brick crashed through a window. At first, “I pretty much hid behind a water cooler,” she says, chatting on the phone in late June. “If you scroll back through my tweets, the whole thing is there.”

INDY Week prides itself on providing “progressive news, culture, and commentary for Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill”; Tauss had spent that evening documenting local protests that mirrored other uprisings nationwide inspired by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis five days earlier. She’d returned to the office in part to wash the tear gas out of her eyes.

“I hid in the basement for a while and ended up leaving with another reporter,” she says. She’d heard strange voices in the office while waiting for her friend to show, but at that point, only a lamp and a water cooler had been stolen. But “the next day, we found out that looters had smashed every window in the building, stolen my computer, set a couch on fire, and made the sprinkler system go off for four hours,” Tauss says. “The entire space was flooded, and it was a total loss. So I tweeted pictures of the vandalized office and all the shattered glass.”

[Read Rob Harvilla's feature about the all-vital alt-weekly.]