Indy Radio: NowFM Contest Stirs Controversy

NowFM Garage Door Contest

Top40 WNOW 100.9 FM’s garage-door-decorating contest has caused controversy in a Muncie neighborhood.

Hannah Brewer (left) and friend

High school student Hannah Brewer, with her mother’s permission, painted the garage door of their residence in an attempt to prove she is the biggest fan of the pop/punk band 5 Seconds of Summer, aka 5SOS.

The winner will receive tickets to the band’s Aug. 22 concert and get to meet the four members backstage at Klipsch Music Center. The Australian band took the stage at this week’s 2015 Teen Choice Awards in Los Angeles.

According to The Star-Press, Brewer, a student at Daleville High School, and a friend got creative, painting images of the band members, a message reading, “5SOS is kinda hot!” a skull, an astronaut and other things on the door.

Soon after that, an anonymous letter. was left in Brewer’s front door. It said, “At first we all thought you had been a victim of vandalism on your garage, seeing how NOTHING like that has ever happened around here before ... In case you haven’t noticed this isn’t LA or Chicago or Mexico and it certainly isn’t south Muncie.

Brewer’s mother, Carrie Mote Craig, a Catholic school teacher, called the police, who told her the painting did not violate any city ordinances.

Though the anonymous letter made Craig think it was from a group of neighbors or the neighborhood association, she learned there is no neighborhood association or any covenants regulating garage door painting.

Craig then wrote and hand delivered throughout the neighborhood a message of her own (also posted on Facebook) reporting that she had received the threatening letter and explaining why the door was painted.

“The garage door painting was meant to be temporary and I would then paint it blue like the rest of the doors on my house,” Craig wrote in the letter.