AUBURN — The mural on the Court Street-facing side of Heathco’s Pizza & Variety was carefully painted by a professional artist with specialized tools last summer.

Owner Mary Nicholson figures the latest addition to the graffiti-style mural was scrawled on last week by a doofus with a can of black spray paint.

“I’m assuming it was just some local punk or something,” Nicholson said. “It’s just unfortunate that people can’t appreciate something people have tried to do. They have to ruin everything.”

Nicholson hired local artist Patrick O’Connell of PC Customs to paint the wall last summer. It features graffiti-style figures — one eating a sandwich, a grill cooking a hamburger and a driver delivering food — in swirling colors.

“We put it all together,” she said. “I told him some things I wanted and he came up with things on his own, like the burger flying off the grill.”

It’s an eye-catching design on a formerly plain wall meant to draw in people’s eyes as they come up over the top of Goff Hill on Court Street.

“People love it,” she said. “They’ve had great things to say.”

She discovered last week that someone had covered the main figure’s sandwich with black spray-painted squiggles. She took to Facebook on Wednesday morning to call out the tagger, but she hadn’t discovered who was responsible.

She’ll paint over the damage, she said.

“We’ll have Patrick come out and fix it,” she said. “He’ll make it look like nothing ever happened.”

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