Police are putting the pieces together after an overnight string of vandalism left dozens of cars smashed in Schenectady. Geoff Redick reports.

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. -- Police are putting the pieces together after an overnight string of vandalism left dozens of cars smashed in Schenectady.

"Wondering why, you know — why someone would go through all the trouble of smashing every single window?" said Shawn Hamraj, who lives on Eastern Avenue.

Hamraj says he did not hear a thing.

"I came out to pick up something from the car, and I realized the window was smashed," said Thomas Agoanyn, who lives on Van Vranken Avenue.

Agoanyn was unaware until noontime Wednesday.

But sometime the night before, police figure around 2 a.m., those two cars and more than a hundred others had windows smashed in by an unknown vandal toting an air gun.

"For all practical purposes, it would have to have been done by somebody or some people inside a vehicle, constantly in motion," said Schenectady Public Safety Commissioner Wayne Bennett.

City cameras and private surveillance picked up the vandals, moving through neighborhoods throughout Schenectady, shooting out windows of cars and businesses.

"Detectives are combing through 160-some-odd cameras throughout the city, to narrow down an exact timeframe to try to get an exact location, and see if there was a vehicle involved," said Schenectady Police Department Sgt. Matthew Dearing.

"One vehicle of mine, the window was completely shattered," said Lashawn Thompson, who lives on Van Vranken Avenue.

Thompson came to file her police report just before noon, but that does not fix the damage.

"My first option is to go to the junkyard, you know, to see what they have there," said Thompson.

"Door glasses could be anywhere from $150 to $300," said Ed Towns, of Ed's Glass.

And rear window repairs could cost up to $4,000, according to Towns. His shop had fielded near a dozen repair calls by midday Wednesday.

"It's amazing — you can actually hit some of this glass with a sledgehammer and it won't break, but if you hit it with a BB and centralize the energy in a small area, it'll break," he said.

But no matter the weapon — a smashed window is no fun.

"I can't figure out why it got broken," Agoanyn said.

"This is just — you know, this is a game to someone. Someone running around, just doing this for fun," said Hamraj.