No supper at Vernon’s Upper Room Mission due to pepper spray incident

VERNON – The Upper Room Mission was forced to evacuate today after someone discharged pepper spray in the dining room.

Roughly 70 people were eating lunch at the time and had to leave the building, the organization’s director of resource development Lisa Anderson says.

While the pepper spray spread quickly through the dining room and kitchen, and caused some coughing and discomfort among staff and patrons, no one was seriously affected.

“No one was injured, thank goodness,” Anderson says.

Staff don’t know exactly what happened, or who discharged the pepper spray, but police were called.

“Now we have to decontaminate everything,” Anderson says.

All of the food being prepared for dinner had to be tossed, as well as a table full of produce giveaways.

Dinner is cancelled tonight, Feb. 1, but operations are expected to resume as normal for breakfast tomorrow morning, Feb. 2.

Anderson says this is the first such incident at the Mission since she is aware of in the past four years.

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