High schooler uses art to cover up graffiti in Rudyard

Frank "Frankie" Neret Jr,. a high schooler in Rudyard took it upon himself to cover up some graffiti near the town landfill with a small spray-paint mural.

Neret, who works at Walmart, said he heard about the graffiti while doing some work for Jaye Dee Han of Rudyard and decided to do something about it.

"I work for somebody who had gone up to the dump and every time they said they hated seeing it, and I didn't like seeing it either so I just decided to put something over it," he said.

Neret's work has generated some positive feedback on social media, and he said, he appreciates the responses on Facebook, much of which he had yet to see.

"It means a lot getting all that positive feedback," he said, "Makes me want to help out more, just gives me the drive to actually do stuff like that."

He said the mural itself took about two hours to create using mostly spray paint of his own with plastic bags used to add texture. But before that, he had to paint over the graffiti already there, which took two days to dry.

Graffiti, particularly sexually explicit graffiti, has been an ongoing issue in Rudyard, Han said, a friend of the Neret family who described the graffiti as vile.

She said she's fairly sure she knows the culprits, a group of young people responsible for a number of vandalism incidents in Rudyard and Havre over the last few years.

She said she's glad for what Neret did, and that this kind of thing is very in-character for him.

"It doesn't surprise me with the type of kid that he is," Han said, "... I'm really proud of him."

Neret said the kind of graffiti he covered up is not something that helps anyone and only serves to create frustration in the community.

"We're a small community," he said, "And I think the only way we're going to really be a community is by being nice to one another, and doing that is just not helping, it just makes people angry."