Vandals who targeted a Washington state neighbourhood and spray-painted hateful, racist graffiti returned to the community to spray-paint “Sorry.”
A Sammamish neighbourhood was tagged with hateful graffiti last week, with swastikas and the N-word painted with red spray-paint on at least 17 different properties, the Tacoma News Tribune reported.
The city condemned the vandalism, calling it a hate crime.
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“We want it to be perfectly clear that Sammamish, this community, our community, will not stand for this kind of behaviour,” the city said in a statement. “Hate has no place here in Sammamish, or anywhere in our country.”
Speaking with KIRO 7 News, King County Sheriff’s Sergeant Ryan Abbott said more graffiti was found in the same neighbourhood earlier this week. This time, with a different message.
“It was a couple different things,” Abbott said. “First it was the word spray-painted ‘Sorry,’ and then next to that there was another spray-paint — it was hard to read — that read, ‘Not hate, just’ something, and then another ‘Sorry.’”
The sheriff said officers patrolling the neighbourhood got a whiff of fresh paint.
“It’s most likely we just missed the person responsible,” Abbott told the News Tribune.
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The sheriff admitted that officers “haven’t concluded 100 per cent it’s the same person” and they hope security footage in the area will help further the investigation.
“It’s in the same red spray paint as before,” Abbott told KIRO 7 News. “And they were just trying to say that they didn’t mean any hate by their tags, which of course were offensive as you had read, but now they’re updating it to say this.”
The sheriff noted that the properties tagged with the graffiti seemed to be random.
“Not necessarily knowing who lived in the houses, at least as far as we’re aware of at this time,” he said. “That could always change once we identify the suspects and interview them.”
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