A Florida man was arrested and has admitted to crashing into the 13-foot sculpture Thunderbunny by Hunt Slonem earlier this week.
Identified as Derek Alan Mordok, the accused is a 49-year-old resident of Florida. Earlier this week, he crashed his car into the blue sculpture located in Justin Flippen Park, Wilton Manors. The police arrested him after surveillance footage caught him in the act. Once arrested, Modrok not only admitted to this vandalism but also vandalized another statue – a popsicle statue by Craige Berube-Gray located in Rachel Richardson Park – earlier this month.
Thunderbunny is a 13 ft 7 in tall sculpture shaped like a rabbit. It is composed of 65,000 pieces of blue glass which give its distinctive color. Made after a year of effort, it was installed in the park exactly a year ago, in May 2022. The work was there as a loan from New River Fine Art and was supposed to travel to a botanical garden next. Rabbits have been a recurring theme in the works of Hunt Slonem since the 1980s, after he found out that his birth year – 1951 – was the Chinese Year of the Rabbit.
Speaking about the act of deliberate vandalism, Slonem said: “9/11 was worse, I lost an 80-foot mural. I was just shocked. It’s just such a strange thing, the fact that it’s happened before and the fact that it happened again.” What Hunt Slonem was referring to here was his giant mural which was lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.
The interesting twist in the story came after Modrok confessed that he vandalized the statue not due to any hostility towards the artist, but towards Justin Flippin – the former mayor of the city after which the park was named. Reportedly, Modrok blamed him for excessive birds in the city.
