Atlanta church owes $20K to fix destroyed sign but who is actually at fault?

ATLANTA - A northwest Atlanta church says it's caught in a back-and-forth between a crane rental service and AT&T. Deacons of the church told FOX 5 someone driving a crane knocked their marquee over last June, and it's been a pile of bricks ever since.

Fuller's Memorial Tabernacle receives offerings and donations, but one deacon says the $20,000 quote they got to fix their marquee is just too much to pay off. The deacon says the person who knocked it down nearly nine months ago should be held responsible.

"This is a bullet hole from the fourth of July one year," Deacon Kerry Steen said while pointing to a patch on the sanctuary wall. "I don't want to shed a dim light on the community, but it is what it is."

Deacon Steen says they found a bullet hole in the church's steeple.

He said he wants to give readers a sense of how much money the church has spent on unexpected repairs.

"We had our steeple replaced. We noticed water leaking and found the reason for the leak was bullet holes in the steeple," he said.

Those issues have been repaired, but the sign out front has not. It's poised to be the most expensive repair yet, with a more than $20,000 price tag.

"A big crane came all the way across the yard and tore up our sign," Steen said. "Children walk past this area around that time. If they were on that sidewalk, one of these kids could've been killed or hurt so bad."

Steens says church members called police, and filed a report. An officer went with them to follow the crane to where it drove.

"The crane operator didn't want to give his information, but police encouraged him to do so," Steen said.

Since then, church leaders said they discovered a crane rental company lent one of their machines to AT&T. The church reached out to the telecommunications company for help and filed a claim with Church Mutual. 

Unfortunately, their insurance company said it'd only cover $5,000 of that $20,000 bill.

"We're in a Catch-22. AT&T says it's the crane company's fault. The crane company says it's AT&T's fault. Never the two should talk to each other," he said.

FOX 5's Alex Whittler reached out to both AT&T and the crane rental service and didn't get an immediate response.