At 11:30 this morning, a Pawtucket police lieutenant, who declined to come to the phone, told the woman who answered the department’s line to tell projo.com the police know nothing of the incident. A Providence police captain has not returned a call from projo.com.

In talking with neighbors, Tanalski said he has heard that perhaps 50 people’s tires were slashed. The cuts in his tires were about an inch wide and deep enough to penetrate the side walls and flatten the tires, rendering them “useless.”

He hasn’t started pricing new tires but imagines replacing the three and re-balancing the tires on the cars will run about $200. He’s contemplating going to a junkyard to see if he can get a cheaper replacement, as “there’s not a lot of money in the till” just after Christmas.

A substitute teacher in East Providence middle and high schools, Tanalski, 45, doesn’t have much hope that those responsible will be caught.

He thinks whoever did the slashing is “truly unaware of the implications” of what they did.

“There are a lot of repercussions to things like this,” he said. “People could get fired because they’re late to work, they don’t have the money now to pay for something that they really needed. It’s a senseless thing, but obviously they weren’t really thinking about that. They were just having fun.”